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Voyager has been a success by any measure. It will be the furthest our species has ever reached to the stars and will be heralded as a pioneer of our best ambitions in the pursuit of knowledge.
Voyager wasn't a good probe, it was the best.
and will be heralded as a pioneer
That will be very confusing for Pioneer 10 :P
Have you seen this? No relation to my username but I bought it as soon as I found out about it.
Thank you, I just drunkenly impulse bought this, gonna be so psyched when it shows up and I forgot about it ^^;;
They really did a great job putting it together. The book alone is so good.
I really...REALLY...want this.
It's really not a bad price either. But, I did just pay $500 for a signed Tool vinyl, so I'm probably just crazy.
Which record? Tool is worth it.
Fear Inoculum. The merch booth was pretty pricy, but I always try to get a signed record when I go to a concert.
I bought one too, one of the first, I think. It's fantastic. One of the jewels of my collection. The only quibble I have is the lapel pin, there's nowhere really to put it.
Oooh that's very cool. Quite tempted...
See ya in the 24th century, V-ger!
23rd century. Vβger appears in Klingon territory in the 2270s.
Sadly Vβger was the fictional Voyager 6 probe.
If it's truly dead, it's a sad day for humanity. The farthest reaches into space we've ever been, and possibly ever will be. It'll just be a lonely probe wondering the cosmos, unable to phone home.
It's a miracle it lasted as long as it did.
It's NASA engineering.
Still very impressive regardless of who did it. Its original mission plan was for a little over 3 years but it worked for 46 years!
14-15x operational plan isn't unheard of. The Mars Ingenuity helicopter outperformed by that much as well.
Done right, engineering does very much resemble magic.
If that's the farthest we ever go, then we're a sad pathetic species that peaked in 1977.
Ok but that's just like your opinion, man.
I mean maybe, there are limitations to physics. We aren't talking science fiction here. The universe is truly much more vast than we think it is, and galaxies are all flying away from eachother. We'd be lucky if we ever even send a message to the next closest star system to ours.
Voyager 1 is not dead. It is only sleeping as it enters the final stage of its 1.5 billion year mission.
Maybe it got picked up.
In about a thousand years, we're gonna get a fine for littering.
From the Vogons, for littering on their hyperspace expressway
Imagine if it is back online, and it keeps sending us prime numbers.
Contact is my favorite movie of all time and I watched it again a couple days ago. β€οΈ
You just reminded me that I should read the book by Carl Sagan. Will probably find more interesting details in the book.
I could be wrong, but didn't this originally happen because a technician sent it some wrong data? I would really hate to be that guy. Not because of anyone blaming him, I seem to recall it had self corrective measures in case that specific event happened. I just wouldn't be able to not blame myself for the loss of such a treasure.
"The people that built the spacecraft are not alive anymore," Dodd said. "We do have a reasonably good set of documentation, but a lot of it is in paper, so you do this archaeology dig to get documents."
Honestly this sounds a bit like negligence. It should be relatively easy to digitize everything and create a complete virtual simulation of the electronics including power levels and thermals so you can easily test the transmissions and programs before sending them.
That is a REALLY shit excuse for any good software engineer. If you can't read well written paper documents then what the fuck are you doing with your life? Just imagine it's a man page printed out
My point is that if there is "only paper" then there is no digital representation, meaning there is no emulation. Right?
That means you're sending a program in machine code outside the solar system without having tested it before. And the people who build this thing are not among us anymore to answer any idiosyncrasies of the hardware / software. If you had a simulation so you can test and minimize the risk to this treasure.
But if you have all the schematics, there's really no reason not to have a digital simulation. I mean, we've had emulated analog synthesizers in pro audio apps for at least a decade. Surely NASA could do this by now.
Yeah. Except time and money. Or maybe the simulation would be too inaccurate and only give a false sense of safety? That's the only reason I can think of why not to do this.
That's all good in theory. However, the RAM on Voyager 1 is an analogue tape recorder, so it will eventually just stop working.
The computer(s) onboard is also the computer-system made by mankind that has been turned "on" for the longest time of any computer. It has never been turned off since the launch in 1977. There's no other computer on Earth that has managed to run consistently for anywhere that long, and frankly I'm unsure if we even could. Theoretically it should be easy, but in practice... I doubt it. Most traffic signs need calibration annually or more frequent.. This thing has been flying through space for 46 years and carrying out Fortran commands every day and now it just doesn't. If there's any physical problems... It's impossible to revive.
What if "they" gonna bring it home like a surprise for being gone.
I'm not supposed to tell you guys this, yet, but it hit the exclusion zone barrier.
Time to let go, NASA. We had a good run. She needs to move on to another Solar System.
