NASA tweaks Voyager 2's power supply to avoid another sensor shutdown NASA boffins seeking a way to postpone instrument shutdowns on the venerable Voyager spacecrafts have worked out a solution they say will get another three years of power to Voyager 2's five remaining scientific tools. The trick involves repurposing Voyager 2's onboard voltage regulator, NASA said. That device is designed to …
Truth. I am always heartened and amazed every time there's yet more Voyager news. "Oh, we discovered this" and "well, we shuffled this around and that helps us carry on for another 3 years" just prove that well-engineered stuff that is not necessarily 2nm sized electronics still makes things tick and teaches us new things about our solar system and beyond every year.
Kudos JPL, kudos NASA.
"just prove that well-engineered stuff that is not necessarily 2nm sized electronics still makes things tick and teaches us new things about our solar system and beyond every year.
"
Most things that are destined to last aren't built on bleeding edge tech. The Voyager satellites were knocked up rather quickly once the chance alignment that gave them a grand tour of the planets was worked out. There wasn't time for new science, just solid engineering to make it to the launch pad on time.
Can you imagine getting hired on the Voyager team as a PFY and figuring you'll have a few good years of it to start your career, then carrying on with it till retirement, then reading a decade or so later how the younglings are still eeking out another year or three out of the probes?
I can't either. Good show all around.
"These people have been really "stellar" at making an old Reliant Robin perform like a Ferrari."
Well, compared to probes today, the Voyagers are Robin Reliants. They've also be going as Reliants for better than 30 years without being put on the hoist which is amazing for anything manufactured. How many things built today will have that sort of longevity?
Methinks your reliable performance measure (Ferrari circa 1977) is somewhat at odds with err,…. the actual reliability of a ‘77 Ferrari or any other Italian or (insert here) manufacturer. I refer you to YouTube and “Influenzo” by Number27
That said, I expect if Voyager had been styled (as opposed to engineered and constructed) by Pininfarina, Bertone, Gandini or Giugiaro.. we’d have likely been contacted and visited by the “owner of the hippest place in the universe”* by now looking to argue about matching numbers, original parts, patina (it’s only original once!) and fitted luggage (and an Insta opportunity).
* “Vell, Zaphod's just zis guy, you know?"
When people ask about "this or that" sh1t website, I just point out that there is a hierarchy of software production:
Website : something produced at Kindergarten level from borrowed script building blocks and coloured crayons
Customisation of commercial software : High school level (see all the stories about SAP/Oracle/etc. configurations over budget and not achieving their goals)
Commercial software : Degree level - if the company if relying on the product then they will have at least specified the features and tested them
Certifiable software : Doctorate level - properly designed and tested by people who know why and whose ar5es are on the line if it doesn't work
Cost increases hugely as you go up the scale, but then so does reliability. Do you want your car brakes software written by a script-kiddie?
Anon as I have software and hardware, that I was in charge of, going into space on a regular basis, and with multiple operators, some of whom are more sensitive than others.
Expecting plenty of down votes by web site 'designers' and up votes from 'engineers'.
"Expecting plenty of down votes by web site 'designers' and up votes from 'engineers'."
Don't worry, the coloured pencil and crayon department aren't technical enough to read El Reg. At time of posting, it's overwhelming clearly that it's mainly technical people reading here :-)
"Website : something produced at Kindergarten level from borrowed script building blocks and coloured crayons"
Plus the borrowed scripts normally should be nuked from orbit.
As someone who for safety reasons visits a "new" website to me with scripting disabled, I get irritated by the number of sites that cannot even manage to present me with a single line of text with JS disabled.
A site should render the basics with JS disabled (depending on what the site does there may be an occasional argument for a small bit of JS for some functionality, but a visitor should be able to get a site basic functionality without JS enabled).
Each time I find such a site as a new visitor its the usual decision.
Do I experiment a while and see what JS to enable that gives basic functionality for the site and then set up the script "allowlist" for that site or do I just go elsewhere & ensure I never visit that site again if alternatives exist elsewhere.
"Why don't they just go and get it?"
Well, you'd need a mighty big rocket, with plenty of fuel onboard just so it catches up with the Voyagers which are travelling at around 40,000 mph (960,000 miles per day).
And given that both Voyages are about 115 AU (about 10.7 billion miles) away from the sun (or about 114 AU away from the Earth at it's closest to the craft), a spacecraft to go and collect them would need to be going very, very fast just to catch up.
Such an imaginary craft would need to have a velocity of at least 440,000 mph (say 11 miilions miles per day) and it would then take at least 3 or 4 years (about 1100 days?) just to catch up.
And once it got to either Voyager, it would need some extreme braking to slow it down, then capture the craft, secure it and then turn around and return to Earth at a very high velocity, as otherwise, the engineers with the knowledge to fix/upgrade Voyager would be long dead.
Adding the time to slow down, turn around and then accelerate back up to 400,000 mph for the return journey and the entire mission might take 10-15 years? And for what? To retrieve an old 1970s era metal craft that has been in space (by then for 50+ years) and is so irradiated with cosmic radiation, it might be untouchable (by humans) for a hundred years.
Much better to leave both craft as they are, until the DSN loses contact with them around 2036. But in the meantime, you could send out Voyagers 3, 4 5 and 6 in other directions, just so that Kirk can find V'Ger in the future?
https://web.archive.org/web/20170919144222/https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/
"...long after the probes have exhausted their radioactive batteries and Earth has hopefully moved beyond operating legacy Fortran code."
In 300 years, when Voyagers reach the Oort Cloud, I don't know what amazing discoveries our scientists will be making, but I'm betting that some of their data will be crunched by Fortran (and their pay will be processed by COBOL).
"... the two craft still have around 300 years of traveling around a million miles a day to make it to the edge of the Oort cloud, the outermost limit of the Sun's gravitational influence.
The icy, comet-like objects that reside in the Oort Cloud will be the Voyagers' last impression of the Solar System as they coast for 30,000 years to reach its far side,....."
.....
“Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.”
― Douglas Adams, The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy
A link budget (the total anticipated loss) of only 203dB getting to Earth is pretty amazing. An estimation rule for signals in free space is that use lose 22 dB in the first wavelength of distance and an additional 6dB for each subsequent doubling of the distance: https://www.microwaves101.com/encyclopedias/free-space-path-loss
The Voyager transmitters work much better than free space loss because of a special antenna that focuses the X-band microwave signal directly back to earth:
https://www.wondriumdaily.com/voyager-2-sends-messages-from-interstellar-space-with-minimal-signal/
In the 1980s the receivers were enhanced with FFT analysis to improve the signal to noise ratio so that anything can be understood at -160dBm.
Additionally the distance means that in the 22+ hours it takes to receive a signal from Voyager the Earth will complete nearly a full rotation. The communication needs to shift between the 3 stations of the deep space network, and because the link is fragile, the shift between stations needs to be phase continuous.
The more you know about the technology involved the more amazing it becomes.
This post has been deleted by its author
It is amazing what was accomplished with Viking communications (the baseline technologies that Voyager launched with). Some of the tricks used at the time, like Maser amplifiers, are exotic. However, what we are seeing now could not have happened without the continuous reworking of the technologies in the receiving stations. My hat is off to all of them past and present.
"NASA extended the Voyager 1 and 2 missions to travel to Neptune and Uranus..."
No, only Voyager 2 made the trip to the ice giants; Voyager 1's observation of Titan ruled-out the possibility of further planetary encounters. From Wikipedia: "Because observations of Titan were considered vital, the trajectory chosen for Voyager 1 was designed around the optimum Titan flyby, which took it below the south pole of Saturn and out of the plane of the ecliptic, ending its planetary science mission.["
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1
The Register 
Biting the hand that feeds IT
Copyright. All rights reserved © 1998–2024
