Voyager 1 & 2 is one of my favourite human science achievements, not even so much from technology standpoint, as it's relatively simple compared to what we have now (although that's one of the charms), but just the fact that it's so far away, it still more or less works long after the scheduled mission end time, we can communicate with it and despite all the modern technology progress, it would take decades to catch up. Absolutely amazing and inspiring!
A large amount of Voyager 1 & 2 's success isn't just technological it is the ability to take advantage of a specific planetary alignment for a gravity assist [1] that can only occur every 175 years [2] .
Every 20 years, Jupiter and Saturn are in position for a gravity assist, which allows you to reach half the outer solar system. In the 1970s, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto were all in the right half.
I read the book but don't recall any correlation to the topic of solar system alignment. Spoiler: Era 3 in the novel does speak of space exploration but this is all before the launches of Voyager (though Sputnik had launched by the books release IIRC).
> if we manage not to blow each other up until then, we have 126 years to go till we can try again.
> A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic social science fiction novel by American writer Walter M. Miller Jr., first published in 1959. Set in a Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the book spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz preserve the surviving remnants of man's scientific knowledge until the world is again ready for it.
Ideally cattle not pets. We are continually shooting stuff out and in 126 years it'll be as nerveracking and watching a train departure, but still exciting knowing the train is going further.
Good idea, but it's hard to get funding for cattle, people pay more for pets perks.
From another comment Jupiter and Saturn align every 20 years, so we have 5 rehearsal windows before the big one. What fancy projects can we do in them to get funding? Is it too late for the first one? Can we ask Elon to pay for the first two?
Don't forget that the mission planners figured out the "Grand Tour", calculating orbits and trajectories to slingshot around the Solar System. All with 1960s technology.
Voyager, Apollo, and Hubble. Everything else NASA has done is a distant 4th place. And it's not like 4th place is trash, it's just that the big 3 are just so impressive.
The rovers on Mars as well and New Horizons that went to Pluto. That is also at escape velocity so it will leave this solar system and most likely no human will ever lay eyes on it again. Voy 1 and 2 are still faster but hey they're all going in different directions so it's not exactly a race.
It was sent to Mars with a plan for 5 flights and a total of 7 or 8 minutes flight time. It ended up flying for over 2 hours in 72 seperate flights before it damaged itself with a bad landing. Not quite the "this thing is still doing science almost 50 years later" that Voyager can claim, but impressively engineered so it lasted way beyond it's initial mission plan.
I don't think Apollo was very interesting or useful beyond cold war propaganda. Yes, we're capable of amazing things—but putting a man on the moon pales in comparison to basic healthcare funding. Why must we insist on wasting billions on histrionic braggadocio when we can't perform the basics of a modern society?
Yes, yes! I got really into the Voyager-inspiration vibes for a while and wrote this little short story about a secret "Voyager 3" mission - thought you might enjoy it: https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/voyager-3/
The thruster fix is the part that gets me. They sent a command that would either revive thrusters dead since 2004 or cause a catastrophic explosion, then waited 46 hours for the round trip with zero ability to intervene. That's a production deployment with no rollback, no monitoring dashboard, and a 23-hour latency on your logs. They nailed it.
There is a terrific documentary, 'Its quieter in the twilight', about the aging and dwindling team that still runs both Voyager missions
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6L9Du_IFmI
Reminded me of the anecdote mentioned in the classic "Real Programmer Don't Use Pascal"
> Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are able to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation -- hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.
> The current plan for the Galileo spacecraft is to use a gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This trajectory passes within 80 +/-3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is going to trust a PASCAL program (or a PASCAL programmer) for navigation to these tolerances.
The article is satirical so I am not sure how true is this, but over its history, the maintainers of these probes have done truly remarkable stuff like this.
Amazing engineering. Today's software development: Write a program running on a framework (of which you need 1%, but get it all), that framework depends on dozens of libraries (but again, you only needed 1% of them), which in turn depends on dozens more.
Result: Your starter program takes 1GB of memory and needs 6 cores to display "Hello, World!"
We waste resources, because Moore's Law gave us resources to waste.
I knew about the memory, but an 8-track tape ? That is a surprise. But when you think of it, what else could you use for this in 1977.
What amazes me is the tape lasted almost 30 years. I knew tapes back then could last a while, 30 years being bombarded with cosmic rays ? inconceivable :)
One of my favorite stories about the Voyager mission was how they wanted to grab photos of the outer planets but the click of the tape drive was enough to ruin the long exposures. I made a YouTube short about it a while back:
> The phone in your pocket has roughly one million times more memory than the computer running Voyager 1.
I know both things are almost entirely unrelated, but I sometimes wonder how much more perf you could squeeze out of a phone if Android wasn't doing so much stuff in the background. Granted I do not know enough about the inner workings.
I’ve been looking at emulation for the first time in a long time, and it also blows my mind that entire big detailed games that we played for many hours take 100-400kb total (NES) or 2-4mb (Genesis).
Nice. I’ve done some of my best learning by trying to do things with very artificially low resource constraints. The struggle I have at times is to properly calibrate my brain to the right resource scope. Ie. “No, stop optimizing these enums as integers instead of strings… this isn’t the game boy emulator this is a web browser. It’s fine.”
What really gets me is that the time between windows 95 and now is more than between voyager launching and Windows 95. Same for the moon landings for that matter.
I wonder if we can build a series of probes sent one after the other, which can communicate with relay network. Im sure we can reduce the power requirements for radio for each probe.
I have a feeling this feat is all about the budget requirements rather than technical feasibility.
the legacy of Voyager 1 is crazy, this spacecraft launched decades before I was born and yet I see it regularly talked about even today. Seeing posts about how the Voyager 1 was leaving the solar system led to me learning about the heliosphere. Hearing about the Pioneer anomaly https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly led me down a rabbit hole of learning about thermal radiation and radiation pressure (granted this is not Voyager). Then I learn about how it is powered by radioisotopes, its kind of cool how many things I've learned from these "ancient" spacecraft.
I watched a documentary about Voyager once. It was fascinating seeing all these men and women huddled around a tiny little screen and a telex printer to see all their theories about Saturn become real.
I know it makes no sense about what I'm going to say but: whenever I lose a 'simple 5G phone call' connection I remind myself that the Voyager 1 runs on 69kb of memory and there's a robot on Mars.
Edwin Berlekamp significantly reduced (by half I think) the number of transistors required for the Reed-Solomon error correcting code by telling them to use a non-standard 'primitive element'
This makes me nostalgic for my 4K TRS-80 Model I with cassette tape. There was something beautiful about having control over everything, and even the tight constraints were sometimes fun.
257 comments
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist [2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#/media/File:Voyager_...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz | https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2626638W/A_Canticle_for_Leib...
> if we manage not to blow each other up until then, we have 126 years to go till we can try again.
> A Canticle for Leibowitz is a post-apocalyptic social science fiction novel by American writer Walter M. Miller Jr., first published in 1959. Set in a Catholic monastery in the desert of the southwestern United States after a devastating nuclear war, the book spans thousands of years as civilization rebuilds itself. The monks of the Albertian Order of Leibowitz preserve the surviving remnants of man's scientific knowledge until the world is again ready for it.
From another comment Jupiter and Saturn align every 20 years, so we have 5 rehearsal windows before the big one. What fancy projects can we do in them to get funding? Is it too late for the first one? Can we ask Elon to pay for the first two?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program
[0] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/visions-of-the-future/
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ingenuity_(helicopter)
It was sent to Mars with a plan for 5 flights and a total of 7 or 8 minutes flight time. It ended up flying for over 2 hours in 72 seperate flights before it damaged itself with a bad landing. Not quite the "this thing is still doing science almost 50 years later" that Voyager can claim, but impressively engineered so it lasted way beyond it's initial mission plan.
> The rovers on Mars as well
Curiosity was intended to operate from 2011-2013 and is still active now, just shy of 5000 days after landing. Really impressive.
https://youtu.be/otwkXZ0SmTs?si=DqEyklYpEbUO69HL
>despite all the modern technology progress, it would take decades to catch up.
Could you elaborate on this?
I despise the naive scientists who did them as much as those who brought the damocletian sword of nuclear weapons on us.
https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-record...
> Some of the most awesome Real Programmers of all work at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart. With a combination of large ground-based FORTRAN programs and small spacecraft-based assembly language programs, they are able to do incredible feats of navigation and improvisation -- hitting ten-kilometer wide windows at Saturn after six years in space, repairing or bypassing damaged sensor platforms, radios, and batteries. Allegedly, one Real Programmer managed to tuck a pattern-matching program into a few hundred bytes of unused memory in a Voyager spacecraft that searched for, located, and photographed a new moon of Jupiter.
> The current plan for the Galileo spacecraft is to use a gravity assist trajectory past Mars on the way to Jupiter. This trajectory passes within 80 +/-3 kilometers of the surface of Mars. Nobody is going to trust a PASCAL program (or a PASCAL programmer) for navigation to these tolerances.
The article is satirical so I am not sure how true is this, but over its history, the maintainers of these probes have done truly remarkable stuff like this.
https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rni/papers/realprg.html
Result: Your starter program takes 1GB of memory and needs 6 cores to display "Hello, World!"
We waste resources, because Moore's Law gave us resources to waste.
What amazes me is the tape lasted almost 30 years. I knew tapes back then could last a while, 30 years being bombarded with cosmic rays ? inconceivable :)
https://youtube.com/shorts/fssIy-wQisA?si=_HM1fgZKGFfaxWhc
> The phone in your pocket has roughly one million times more memory than the computer running Voyager 1.
I know both things are almost entirely unrelated, but I sometimes wonder how much more perf you could squeeze out of a phone if Android wasn't doing so much stuff in the background. Granted I do not know enough about the inner workings.
Now, this is what impressed me the most: ""... and wrote software flexible enough to be updated from Earth decades after launch.."
OTA patches where invented in the 70's :)
https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2053/how-was-magne...
https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/
``
The tape recorder did not fail.``The power supply simply could no longer spare the energy to run it.
That distinction matters.
I have a feeling this feat is all about the budget requirements rather than technical feasibility.
It was the Neil Armstrong moment for astronomy.