Perspective
That puts my current system down in perspective. The fix:
Log into the VM Host, restart VM and it all starts working again ...
Engineers are hopeful the veteran spacecraft Voyager 1 has turned a corner after spending the past three months spouting gibberish at controllers. On March 1, the Voyager team sent a command, dubbed a "poke," to get the probe's Flight Data System (FDS) to try some other sequences in its software in the hope of circumventing …
They'd have done that. But the bloke with the big reset-hammer had his credit card rejected, when he tried to fuel his van to get out there.
Apparently there weren't enough noughts on the diesel pump.
So they tried swearing at it. But in space, nobody can hear you scream, "work you bastard thing!"
So now they've been reduced to debugging it. I must say I'll be disappointed if they're analysing their newly downloaded data on computers, rather than massive stacks of fanfold paper as God intended. Was that an earhquake in California? No, just JPL's daisywheel printers...
Many years ago before I ascended to the heady heights of systems administrator I had a job driving taxis in Taunton where Debenhams had their data processing facility. A daily job was for one of us to go round to their place with a van at four AM and pick upreams of fandfold paper for transport to the head office on Oxford St. Goodness knows what happened to it but I struggled to imagine the eighties equivalient of the C-suite wading through it all.
My mate used to take a box of used fanfold home every so often - his wife was a primary school teacher and used it for art. The boss saw him carting a box out one day and went mad when he found out the reason. He was worried that it contained confidential stuff, so my mate let him look through it. Neither of them had a clue what was on it - just the usual meaningless rows of numbers with lots of asterisks I bet. The school contintued to get its art supplies.
Maybe they could have hitched a lift on Elon's space launched Telsa Roadster. It must be approaching Voyager 1 anytime soon.
ummm... the Roadster and Starman won't ever leave the Sol system... their trajectory takes them just past the orbit of Mars where they loop back, go around the sun, and back to Earth's orbit.. they never had the speed needed to leave the star system... the Voyagers used planetary gravity assist flybys to gain the necessary speed for leaving...
currently, Roadster and Starman are 5.25 light minutes from Earth and approaching at 3.6 km/s... together, they have completed 4 orbits around Sol and are at the beginning of their 5th orbit in the 6 years since their launch...
https://www.whereisroadster.com/
For comparison:
Voyager 1 i 15,134,324,455 mi, 162.81208868 AU, 22:34:04 Light hh:mm:ssi from Earth, moving AWAY from the Earth at a Velocity of 38,026.77 mph
Elon's Telsa Roadster. is: 58,606,261 miles, 0.630 AU, 5.24 light minutes) from Earth, moving TOWARD Earth at a speed of 7,719 mi/h (12,422 km/h, 3.45 km/s).
Spoiler alert!
If I were being harsh, I'd say that the people that spoiled Star Trek the Motion Picture, were the ones who made it.
There's even a joke about how only the even numbered ones were good. Which is odd (if you'll pardon the pun), because the Wrath of Khan is, but I'm not sure about many of the rest. Maybe some of the later TNG ones?
And then JJ Abrams turned Kirk into a hyperactive whiny teenager in search of a bloody good slap. Although I did like the opening scene of his first film.
I his defence (and I don't think Abrams wrote the script, BTW) it is about the early years of Kirk. And it sort of fits with his general demeanour in the first gen.
But I can barely distinguish the later prequel movies from each other, and I'm not even sure if I've seen (slept through) some of them.
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A long walk yes, but a short drive. I live in Canberra and I've been to the deep space complex many times. They have a great visitor centre with lots to see, and plenty for the kids. I've touched a real moon rock there, and seen one of the space suits used by Apollo astronauts to walk on the moon. They also have the telescope used to receive the footage of Neil Armstrong's one small step (it's been relocated there from Honeysuckle Creek where it was at the time).
Those DSN dishes are scheduled to be retired after the Voyager program ends, which will be after the final processor finally goes titsup or the RTG finally gives up its last gasp from its thermocouple (the RTG will continue to heat, the most common failure in RTG's is the thermocouple).
And hats off to the original software developers. The software for the Voyagers was developed by early adopters of then emerging modular programming techniques for reliability and ease of maintenance and modification. It's paid off with the many successful mission changes since over the extended lives of the Voyagers.
You know that all such "AI" just collapses into a heap of nonsense the second it has to think for itself, receives unexpected data or strays outside its training boundaries, right?
Well, sure, just AI alone won't do the job. You need to add some quantum.
If I was in charge I would put the 'digital twin' on the web so that Joe Public could have a crack at fixing it.
With so many people in parallel tinkering, someone must come up with the answer fairly soon.
And of course, you don't have the long turn around time to try your changes.
"With so many people in parallel tinkering, someone must come up with the answer fairly soon"
The million monkeys and Shakespeare? The big problem is knowing when you have the right answer so you can stop, and that takes the expertise (genius, or whatever) that's intrinsically missing from a crowd source, as it's an individual capacity.
I don't recall who originally posted this link to decoding Voyager 1 data but this is it: https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/
Hats off to the original designers and the ongoing skills which contribute to our continued fascination on this project. And publicising/distributing the processes. Have one of these ---->
It's almost Friday and we get some positive news on Voyager.
Never ceases to amaze me that it's still going. I know one day it will stop, but always brings me some joy to know it's still out there, talking back to us after such an incredibly long time. Well done space boffins, I salute you!
"Many of the engineers who worked on the project - Voyager 1 launched in 1977 - are no longer around,. . ."
May I meet all of you in "Nerd Valhalla" when I finally shuffle off this mortal coil. Thanks for bringing knowledge, inspiration, and beauty into this life.
I don't wish to upset anyone with this idea, but what if you have been insufficiently nerdy in your life? What if you aren't sent to Nerd Valhalla - but you're sent to the "other place"?
And this is too horrible to contemplate...
You could be sent down to The Helldesk
Where the phone never stops ringing, and the daemons' whips never cease to lash.
You could be sent down to The Helldesk
Possibly, but I suspect IBM have long ago visited Satan and persuaded him to offshore the Helldesk to India, or worse still South Africa. So presumably if you go to the Helldesk you're being reincarnated in one of those locations.
>...and the team that remains is faced with trawling through reams of decades-old documents to deal with unanticipated issues
I remember 'documentation' -- I'm about the same vintage as the Voyager originals (but still upright, more or less) and how we used to have to write reams of it as part of the process of designing software. So old fashioned, so quaint. These days you're supposed to clone a project from GitHub and watch a couple of ad-hoc videos. (There's nothing inherently wrong with GitHub, of course, apart gnawing misgivings about corporate parentage / patronage but a quick video doesn't have the same 'je ne sais quoi' of actual documentation -- many videos are surprisingly content-free!)
For those who don't quite get it, actually writing documentation is an important step in the design process. We're not talking about user manuals or repair documents, that stuff is best left to professional writers, but being able to crystallize out your ideas and get the straight before writing any code can shorten the actual coding and testing phases dramatically. (....and yes, I've had to do this in the dark days before word processors....)
"many videos are surprisingly content-free!"
That's how most of our ongoing training is delivered. The best way to deal with it IME is to blast through as quickly as possible and do the test while it's still fresh in the mind. The real training happens when you are on site in front of the broken kit and have the service manual open :-)
In my job, the kit we service has excellent online, free[*], searchable service manuals for all of the (well known) OEMs we deal with. Compared with 10-20 years ago, I find them much improved not only in terms of availability but in terms of being current, with links to fault finding and all sorts of resources I'd previously have to hunt down or even pay significant money for, if they even existed. This may not apply across the industry, or in other industries, or to consumer grade kit, but my experience can only be described as positive :-)
* not always freely available to all, I admit. Most offer at least the service manuals to all, some restrict some information only to authorised "partners" and "service techs", but it is all there but generally, it's not hard to find the teardown info, f/w, drivers and all the stuff you need for 95% of the work, even if not an "authorised" technician. Few offer the circuit diagrams mind, but 99% of the time, you don't want or need that level of detail unless you are working to a tight budget and the kit is out of warranty, which doesn't happen in my job :-)
A lot of the code for Voyager was initially put together for the Viking program's CCS (Computer Command System) computer, which Voyager shared for cost reasons. The CCSs were hand-built by JPL.
The code for the CCS was initially developed in Fortran IV, then ported to Fortran 77. These days, they mostly use C.
Strangely enough, I have never seen the braying fanbois calling to port it all to Rust. I wonder why ...
Control channel is in the 2-4 GHz range. Telemetry is somewhere around double that. Regarding aiming: I imagine that the beam is considerably spread out by the time it reaches earth from voyager. From earth, I imagine they just boost up the power until voyager can hear it -- something you aren't permitted to do on microwave base links.
I remember the prediction that some of the scientific instruments would continue to operate "at least until 2020". You may argue that 47 years is far longer than 43 years, but I'm unconvinced.
In any case -- little of all we value here | Wakes on the morn of its (47th) year | Without both feeling and looking queer. -- (pace Oliver Wendell Holmes)
That is good, that spacecraft is way out there and still talking to the folks on Earth, one has to find that amazing. The question is, when will the USA send another one of these up in another direction? Hell, if it were me making the decision, one would go up every year, and in every direction, that way you have more ways of contacting other life out there. And no question of is their life out there, if you say there cannot be, you are wrong
Well, the trouble is that "Scientific Inquiry" is no longer a sufficient reason to launch any spacecraft. These days there has to be a ROI within this quarter, or it will not get done. I predict that nothing on the order of the Hubble will ever get done again because there is no immediate profit in it. After all, who cares if the universe is 13.1 or 23.2 billion years old? How does that get me any goodies? It doesn't? Well never mind then. Nobody was interested in revisiting the moon until they found minerals they could mine for $$$$. Now there is a mad rush to the moon.