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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 (12 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] 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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