this post was submitted on 06 May 2024
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Voyager 1 (mander.xyz)
submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[–] [email protected] 334 points 5 months ago (45 children)

I still cannot believe NASA managed to re-establish a connection with Voyager 1.

That scene from The Martian where JPL had a hardware copy of Pathfinder on Earth? That’s not apocryphal. NASA keeps a lot of engineering models around for a variety of purposes including this sort of hardware troubleshooting.

It’s a practice they started after Voyager. They shot that patch off into space based off of old documentation, blueprints, and internal memos.

[–] [email protected] 26 points 5 months ago (5 children)

I realize the Voyager project may not be super well funded today (how is it funded, just general NASA funds now?), just wondering what they have hardware-wise (or ever had). Certainly the Voyager system had to have precursors (versions)?

Or do they have a simulator of it today - we're talking about early 70's hardware, should be fairly straightforward to replicate in software? Perhaps some independent geeks have done this for fun? (I've read of some old hardware such as 8088 being replicated in software because some geeks just like doing things like that).

I have no idea how NASA functions with old projects like this, and I'm surely not saying I have better ideas - they've probably thought of a million more ways to validate what they're doing.

[–] [email protected] 27 points 5 months ago (4 children)

Probably brought in some of the original guys for one last job.

[–] [email protected] 32 points 5 months ago

takes long drag off cigarette "I'm too old for this shit"

[–] [email protected] 15 points 5 months ago (2 children)

You sure? The smell off some of the corpses will have been terrible.

I'm not saying they're all dead, but an intern at the time of launch would now be 70. Anybody who actually designed anything is... Well... The odds of them still being around are low.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

I have a uncle who worked on Apollo writing machine code, and he is a spry, clear-headed 80-something-year-old.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 5 months ago

IIRC, they did pull in a guy who had just started his career on the project.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

Son of a bitch, I'm in.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago

do I hear heist movie?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 5 months ago

The Hard Fork podcast had a pretty good episode recently where they interviewed one of the engineers on the project. They’d troubleshooted the spacecraft enough in the past that they weren’t starting from square one, but it still sounded pretty difficult.

[–] [email protected] 12 points 5 months ago

They apparently didn't have an emulator. The first thing I'd have done when working on a solution would have been to build one, but they seem to have pulled it off without.

[–] [email protected] 6 points 5 months ago

There is an fascinating documentary about the team that sends the commands to Voyager 1 and 2 called It's Quieter in the Twilight

[–] [email protected] 4 points 5 months ago (1 children)

100% they've got an emulator, they've had dedicated test environments since the moon landing for emulating disaster recovery scenarios since the moon landings, they've likely got at least one functioning hardware replica and very likely can spin up a hardware emulation as a virtual machine at will.

Source: I made this up, but I have a good understanding of systems admin and have a interest in space stuff so I'm pretty confident they would have this stuff at bare minimum

[–] [email protected] 2 points 5 months ago

That's my assumption too, but we're talking about a different era, and I really have no idea how they approached validation and test/troubleshooting.

I've seen some test environments for manned missions, but that's really for humans to validate what they're doing.

V'ger was quick 'n dirty by comparison (with no criticism of the process or folks involved...they had one chance to get these missions out there).

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