NASA just patched Voyager 2's software but spared Voyager 1 the risky rewrite

NASA patched its Voyager 2 spacecraft last week, to address a bug that last year saw its sibling generate corrupted telemetry data, but won't know if its fix worked – or overwrote critical code – until some time after October 28. Both Voyagers were launched in 1977. Voyager 1 is now more than 22 billion kilometers (15 billion …

[Paul Crawford]

Wow, the skill needed to perform remote updates on these two craft beats anything else mankind has done so far. Good to see they are still returning valuable science!

Folks, a beer or three for everyone involved in the program, from those who designed them in the 70s to those (maybe some the same?) still supporting them half a century later =>

[Dabooka]

Absolutely unreal achievement Those distances are just mind boggling

[Michael H.F. Wilkinson]

Software patches available after 46 years of operation

Now THAT is proper long term support!

Amazing stuff by the team at NASA

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Software patches available after 46 years of operation

20 years Long Term Support Agreements are common in Aerospace, covering a broad range of products. So 46 years on one product is admirable, but LTA is not unusual.

I left my last company in that field when new Manglement organised our Nitrogen store to be cleared out (over a holiday weekend, and straight into a chipper), with 18 year old equipment needed to support a number of still flying projects (in one case a 30 year LTA). I didn't want to still be around if the FAA/CAA/etc. came around to investigate, because you can be sure that the Manglement a-holes who caused the problem will have long gone.

Anon, for obvious reasons/

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Software patches available after 46 years of operation

When I used to work for a big US company we had software to occasionally build that had been written in the 1980s; and we had some ancient UNIX workstations to do it. These were military contracts that had 30+ year agreements for software updates. My boss decreed that all such workstations should be tossed, because "We don't do those any more." When I reminded her these were military files, and we were obligated to support them for a very extended period of time, she laughed at me. Shortly after I left, she was promoted to a division manager. I can only imagine what will happen when WW3 starts and they need to supply these files...but certainly nothing to her I'm sure.

[Philo T Farnsworth]

Re: Software patches available after 46 years of operation

I suspect that one of the greatest dangers tht the Voyagers face is the longevity and the institutional memory of the engineers supporting them.

I wonder how many engineers these days even have a passing familiarity with the technology present in these probes?

In 1977, televisions were largely still built on tube and discrete transistor technology, integrated circuits were still relatively new, and the technology in the Voyagers is probably older than that, since NASA tends to build with well-proven stuff and not the latest and greatest whizmo.

[The Basis of everything is...]

Re: Software patches available after 46 years of operation

Several years ago one of my cousins came out of retirement to do some design work on high voltage engineering that wasn't taught at the universities any more. And yes, it was after spending an evening in a bar with a bunch of random other engineers lamenting what kids these days take don't know and take for granted.

I don't recall the details, but at the currents and voltages involved integrated circuits don't so much as go yellow and runny as sublime. Pretty much the same happens to people too. I just hope that some unfortunate soul didn't discover both facts at the same time.

[Alumoi]

Re: Software patches available after 46 years of operation

... meanwhile, on Earth, we have the patch that patched the Patch Tuesday.

[Inventor of the Marmite Laser]

Not for many years but...

When these two birds finally get shut down there had better be one HELL of a farewell party.

[Jet Set Willy]

How about a 50th birthday party?

With luck they can both attend, albeit remotely

[Caver_Dave]

Software long term support is not rare in some industries

Software long term support is not rare in some industries.

If you are willing to pay a reasonable amount, then Wind River will support and enhance 25+ year old versions of the VxWorks RTOS.

I've recently performed enhancement work on 1990's vintage VxWorks 5.x, in a situation where changing to a newer hardware and software version was not a palatable option for the customer, but they wanted to support a new/replacement peripheral.

(Wikipedia has a list of publicly acknowledged VxWorks projects that you can see have no chance of replacement and need long term support.)

I would imaging that NASA have a "digital twin" of Voyager to test their code updates on - something that Wind River highlight in their Studio IDE CI/CD platform and has been supporting at processor level using SIMICS for decades.

[wolfetone]

Re: Software long term support is not rare in some industries

I would love to know, in excruciating detail, how NASA are able to do any of this. I'd like to think one day we'll be told, or some kind commentard will point out what I'm after was done years ago.

[Watashi]

Re: Software long term support is not rare in some industries

Making proper documentation is harder than building space probes, but maybe NASA cracked that problem too.

[MyffyW]

Re: Software long term support is not rare in some industries

I would love to see an emulated "digital twin" of Voyager. I'm imagining this as something like SAL 9000, even though I know it's probably closer to a ZX81.

SAL-9000: Will I dream?

Dr. Chandra: Of course you will. All intelligent beings dream. Nobody knows why. Perhaps you will dream of HAL...just as I often do.

[Caver_Dave]

Re: Software long term support is not rare in some industries

They used to have physical twins of the probes.

I remember them running a copy of Mars2020 rover around a sand and boulder strewn parking lot.

[sitta_europea]

Re: Software long term support is not rare in some industries

"Software long term support is not rare in some industries...."

Right. Because HMRC changed the rules, I'm currently working on multi-user sales office software for DOS that I wrote in the 1980s.

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Software long term support is not rare in some industries

perhaps or a physical triplet...

[Phones Sheridan]

Not a job I would want.

I wouldn’t want to be the engineer responsible for uploading the changes because one day it isn’t going to work, and I wouldn’t want to be remembered by history as the engineer that killed Voyager 1 (/2).

[MyffyW]

Re: Not a job I would want.

Amen to that, knowing my luck it would be me who borked it. Still, it would make quite a tale for the El Reg column Who? Me?

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not a job I would want.

Not 'a' tale, THE tale :).

I mean, who could beat that?

[SnailFerrous]

Re: Not a job I would want.

Especially if my boss decided I had to do an on-site visit to fix them.

The mileage claim would be epic though.

[Red~1]

Re: Not a job I would want.

Do you still think you could do it for 45p a mile or will HMRC need to invent a new standard allowance for the "rocket" vehicle class :D

[Anonymous Coward]

Re: Not a job I would want.

You probably don't own your own spaceship, so mileage reimbursement would be less than you might expect. Check Buzz Aldrin's expense report for reference:

https://twitter.com/TheRealBuzz/status/626812956148248577

[Michael Hoffmann]

Re: Not a job I would want.

Surprised some accounting drone, even then, didn't kick it back with a sour-faced "you spelled the name of that aircraft carrier wrong".

[Spazturtle]

Re: Not a job I would want.

All changes are made as temporary. Once the temp changes have been tested as working they can be committed and made permanent. The Voyagers reboot once a month and that will wipe out any temp changes.

So unless the software causes a hardware issue there is quite a bit of safety.

[collinsl]

Re: Not a job I would want.

I thought they were making these changes permanent because they'd need it to not do the broken things any more?

Unless you mean it's like a COMMIT/ROLLBACK situation where if they don't commit it then it remains temporary until the next reboot.

[Spazturtle]

Re: Not a job I would want.

"Unless you mean it's like a COMMIT/ROLLBACK situation where if they don't commit it then it remains temporary until the next reboot."

Yes.

[Jim Birch]

Re: Not a job I would want.

An engineer? A team effort with layers of cross checking and review. It doesn't go out till everyone is happy.

Not just so there's no one to blame...

[xanadu42]

The Force is strong with this one...

Well "The Force is strong with these two" :)

Voyager's Launched in the same year as Star Wars was released, and two years before I physically saw a computer (an A4-sized single-board device with 4-digit LED display and around 10 switches to do programming!!)

Fantastic Hardware Engineering, Fantastic Software Engineering and Fantastic Software Support from NASA...

Just wish that the Standards of then still applied now...

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: The Force is strong with this one...

For a little more context, Commodore PET first sold, Jan'77, Apple ][ first sold, June'77, Tandy TRS-80, Aug'77.

Obviously you may not have seen them, but as I said, for additional context, fully built and ready to use consumer home computers outside of the dedicated hobbyist market were actually available just before (bit only just!) Voyagers launches :-)

[Winkypop]

Car 54 where are you?

Brilliant stuff. I’m glad these amazing boffins and boffinesses were listening during school.

[wolfetone]

It makes me feel better regarding my own code that even NASA, on a device nearly 50 years old, are fixing problems that they're not quite sure how they occurred.

[MyffyW]

Still, they can probably blame cosmic rays for any unexpected behaviour with more justification than you or I can.

[wolfetone]

The next bug I have to explain I'm going to blame it on that, and see how far I get.

I will report back!

[Bill Gray]

I've never been able to accurately assign blame to a cosmic ray for a problem in my code. I have been able to blame the full moon for a software issue, though.

[Anonymous Anti-ANC South African Coward]

r/HFY is full of stories featuring the Voyager probe.

Makes for good fantasy reading.

https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/o23jb8/voyager/

https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/2bbsqd/oc_the_year_after_next_part_1/

https://www.reddit.com/r/HFY/comments/op2zot/prognosis_on_humanity_the_discovery_of_voyager/

There are more besides.

Enjoy.

[Andy The Hat]

Damn good job they don't run Win10 ... sorry, no updates as your hardware isn't new enough ...

[RM Myers]

I have windows 10 running on a computer I built using an ABIT motherboard bought in 2008 for USD $30. With an SSD replacing the hard drive originally used, it is actually more responsive than when I built it. It wasn't my oldest computer running windows 10, but my HP 17" laptop from 2007 died last year (the GPU had an issue caused by HP's crappy cooling system. The CPU is socketed, but the GPU is soldered and needs reballed).

[Arthur the cat]

Slow communication

communication is therefore very slow – 160 bits per second to Voyager 1 as of May 2022

Still better than the 110 baud modem I was using 3 years after Voyager 1 launched.

[captain veg]

Re: Slow communication

V.23 was still common in the late 1990s. Upload at 75 bps.

-A.

[Mr. V. Meldrew]

Re: Slow communication

110 Bits Per Second? faster than my BT broadband and I'm only 1 mile out from the exchange!

[Version 1.0]

NASA works to make everything work

So one NASA group writes the code and then another group looks for all the problems that might occur. Another factor is that the Voyager is using hardware and software, both verified originally as functional but possibly some issues as a result of the distance these days. Outside NASA people just write code and are happy because it's working, they rarely verify that problems could exist but have not been seen.

I expect that the latest patch will be OK because NASA will have prevented so many patching errors from being installed in the Voyager world. In this type of environment NASA looks for problems to prevent them, they don't just say, "It looks like it's working today" - we all need to respect NASA for their working world.

[Peter Gathercole]

Re: NASA works to make everything work

I sort of understand what you're saying, but the computers in the Voyagers only have a few K-words of memory (32K-words including redundant copies if you believe https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/frequently-asked-questions/). You could almost table-run this code by hand to check it's function before sending it to the spacecraft themselves.

I remember teaching simple programming and computer fundamentals using this technique back in the '80s.

[Sceptic Tank]

Wanton destruction

If there's still so much fuel on board, why don't they aim it at some random alien planet? By the time it smashes in there and ruins someones day the rest of us will be long gone. That's what I would have done.

[Richard 12]

Re: Wanton destruction

It's not physically possible to do that, as we can't measure the orbital elements of another planet with sufficient precision.

[Orv]

Re: Wanton destruction

It's got enough fuel to change its orientation. Significantly changing its *trajectory* would require a lot of fuel, though. It's got a massive amount of velocity thanks to a momentum exchange with Jupiter.

[Paul Cooper]

V'GER

Perhaps the changes are the first step in the transformation!

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: V'GER

As someone mentioned further up, 32K words of memory. It'll need a physical RAM and CPU upgrade before it can even begin to transform into V'Ger and that will probably need a physical presence service visit to install the SSD.

[Dabooka]

Always very impressive

However surely it's time they bought them back for a service? Maybe a wash down, upgrade to a Pi 5 or something

[Cruachan]

Incredible work from the team at NASA as always!

[Plest]

There are people on the planet so smart they can patch a 45 year old satellite's firmware from millions of miles away over radio, yet MS can't issue a set of patches without screwing up my day!

[Orv]

To be fair the budget for Microsoft Windows 11 probably wasn't $865 million.

[Tim99]

But Saturn Vs cost more than Intel i7 laptops. Then add the relative cost of their respective docking stations...

[jake]

"To be fair the budget for Microsoft Windows 11 probably wasn't $865 million."

Last time I checked, the budget for Microsoft's R&D, Sales and Marketing for 2023 was just in excess of 50 billion dollars.

[Will Godfrey]

Respect!

Utmost respect for the original designers of these craft as well as the 'kids' also working alongside.

[E_Nigma]

Proper protocol

Nice that they launched both the QAS and PROD instance of the probe.

[DS999]

iFixit should award them

11/10 points for being the most repairable tech item ever produced!

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: iFixit should award them

While I take your point, I could also point out a LOT of tech items many times older still working as intended with lots of love and attention, eg steam engines, both static and on rails, Tower Bridge still raises frequently etc etc etc, all "tech" of their day, even if iFixit doesn't cover that stuff :-) There are still working examples of Commodore Pets, Apple ][ and TRS-80, some of which pre-date the launch of the Voyagers. Admittedly, they all get hands-on love and care, which makes maintenance a little easier :-)

[DS999]

Re: iFixit should award them

OK but I meant "tech" as electronic - something that runs software. A purely mechanical object will be able to be fixed a million years from now, though you have the "is the same axe?" question if every part has been replaced a dozen times in those million years!

[John Brown (no body)]

Re: iFixit should award them

Oh, yes, I do agree with you. Most still running steam engines will almost certainly have had the boiler replaced, at the very least. And I've seen car and aircraft "restorations" that are lucky to have as much as 10% original parts. On the tech side though, there are mainframes and minis from that era still going in enthusiast/museum hands, although I have no idea how much is original parts. But again, I stress, I'm in awe of the Voyagers continued operation where there no chance of hands-on maintenance :-)