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] .<p>[1] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist</a>
[2] <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#/media/File:Voyager_Path.svg" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#/media/File:Voyager_...</a>
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 wonder what the optimal most fastest speed out of the solar system gravity assist path ever possible is and when that occurs?
Fingers crossed, if we manage not to blow each other up until then, we have 126 years to go till we can try again.
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.<p>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?
You might enjoy "A Canticle for Leibowitz" on this topic.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz</a> | <a href="https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2626638W/A_Canticle_for_Leibowitz" rel="nofollow">https://openlibrary.org/works/OL2626638W/A_Canticle_for_Leib...</a>
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.<p><a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Tour_program</a>
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.
James Webb Telescope is up there with Hubble.
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?<p><a href="https://youtu.be/otwkXZ0SmTs?si=DqEyklYpEbUO69HL" rel="nofollow">https://youtu.be/otwkXZ0SmTs?si=DqEyklYpEbUO69HL</a>
There's better things to dump instead of Apollo if you want a basically functioning society. Pick your couple of least favorite wars of choice in America's recent history. Apollo at least gave the country hope and showed that we could accomplish big ideas.
> "<i>"useful"</i><p>Fuck all of it is <i>useful</i> besides satellites. Even the HST is only marginally useful; useful for fields of research which will almost certainly never have tangible benefits for life on Earth, built to satisfy our curiosity about phenomena too large and far from Earth to ever be put into use here on Earth.<p>Nonetheless, <i>interesting</i>? You're bonkers if a system like the Apollo program and all associated hardware isn't at least <i>interesting</i>.
I hate this argument. Every time there is some big and expensive technical achievement, someone is going to say that the poor are dying somewhere in the world. As if not going to the moon would have saved them.<p>I would argue that a healthy population is what allows great things like Apollo to happen. For such a program to succeed, we need lots of highly skilled people. Scientists, engineers, astronauts, tradesmen, managers, etc... Everyone needs to be at the top of their game. Such talent doesn't develop when you are struggling for your life, you need good conditions like health, confort and stability to be able to focus on your craft.<p>If we use life expectancy as a proxy, we could say that the US had a healthier population during the cold war than the USSR, and they are the ones who succeeded on the most ambitious project in the space race, despite the USSR having a head start. To me, it is not a coincidence.<p>Also, the cold war era was not just about space, it is also a time of major advance when it comes to medicine, life expectancy has seen a dramatic improvement, so we can put men on the moon and keep a population heathy.
Which country do you think got basic healthcare funding right ?
Relative to what, the US? I'd say the thirty wealthiest countries on the planet... except us.
Since we are talking about the cold war: USSR.<p>They had pretty good results post WW2. The problem is that they ended up lagging behind the western bloc because of a lack of resources and innovation. Basic healthcare doesn't mean much if you don't have good treatment in the first place. It is a common problem with communist countries, they usually have good access to healthcare, but they don't have the resources to give proper treatment.
Norway
China
>despite all the modern technology progress, it would take decades to catch up.<p>Could you elaborate on this?
Take decades to catch up to the location of either voyager probe. The probes have be traveling for a long time. They have also taken advantage of a rare planetary alignment that allowed them to visit a lot of planets and get gravity assists from them (converting a tiny portion of the planet's angular momentum into orbital speed for the spacecraft)
Voyager 1 and 2 are 25 and 21 billion kilometres away, respectively.<p>Even if we built a rocket just designed to get stuff as far away as quickly away as possible, it would take decades to catch up to where they are now.
I assume OP means that a probe launched today would take decades to exit the solar system.
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: <a href="https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/voyager-3/" rel="nofollow">https://f52.charlieharrington.com/stories/voyager-3/</a>
They are dangerous and reckless. They were also done in the name of humanity, but without humanity’s consent.<p>I despise the naive scientists who did them as much as those who brought the damocletian sword of nuclear weapons on us.
Earth's "radio bubble" is well over 100 light years across now. If there are aliens out there, they are probably already on their way to ask us in person why Ross, the largest Friend, doesn't simply eat the others.
After the transition to digital TV our broadcasted signals mostly look like noise, though. Maybe an outside observer would assume that our civilization ended sometime in 2010.
You can still see from far away that our planet's atmosphere has a very unusual chemical composition that's far out of equilibrium.<p>We are already using spectroscopy to gain insights into the chemical composition of exo-planets, and we have barely begun doing this kind of research. In even just a few decades we'll be massively better at this.
Radio signals do weaken and dissipate over time and space. Broadcast signals could fade into the cosmic microwave background in a few light years depending on their strength. The sci-fi trope of aliens picking up Earth tv and radio just isn't plausible.
And in that light, you're worried two blocks the size of a small car will get picked up on the alien's hyperspace scanners?
Yet we spend tax dollars trying to do the same thing.
No, we don't. If you're talking about SETI, that's looking at radio signals. If you're talking about killer asteroid early-warning detection, we generally don't have the capacity to reliably detect voyager-sized asteroids even in our own solar system, let alone in interstellar space.
I'm not, but other people seem to think it's a problem worth worrying about.
Imagine how far technology has come in 100 years. Then imagine if the alien had just a 1 million year head start to technology. 1 million years is less than 1/1000 of the age of the universe earlier.<p>We have literally no idea what technology the alien could have.
Maybe there are aliens out there so advanced that they could be reading our screens right now in realtime from across the galaxy using some weird post-quantum silly sauce we can't even comprehend. But it doesn't seem likely given what we do know and observe, at least not to me (based mostly on the Fermi Paradox and thermodynamics) that there is someone 100 light years away teasing I Love Lucy from the CMB. It seems less likely that they would be able to pinpoint our location based on that, and try to annihilate us.
I think you're not appreciating how big space is. They're not going to be near any star for <i>thousands</i> of years - and near here is still <i>very</i> distant. If we're still around then, we'll probably be able to look after ourselves.
The chances of either Voyager ending up in the hands of intelligent aliens are remote compared to the chances of us blowing ourselves up. Be happy that there is at least a tiny possibility of a tombstone for a race which once upon a time aeons ago showed some promise. Personally I think they should have stuck a mummy in there.
There is zero empirical evidence that aliens actually exist. All the arguments for why they <i>should</i> exist despite this lack of evidence are borderline theology.
I assume you are against them due to the silent forest hypothesis? Better not announce ourselves, because anything out there might not be friendly to us?
The dark forest hypothesis assumes that it's easy to travel between stars, so interstellar conquests are possible. But it doesn't seem to be the case.<p>There are no material goods that can justify the material and energetic expense of any interstellar travel. You'd be far better off just using a particle accelerator to forge any chemical element and then assemble them into molecules using nano-replicators.<p>The best you can do is to send information, possibly with the help of gravitational lensing.<p>Sci-fi mode on: given that the potential galactic civilization is going to be information-based, who's to say the Earth is not already under attack? An interstellar fleet of large invasion ships with soldiers is not feasible, but a small drone with an AI that connects to terrestrial networks and steers the civilization towards collapse is possible. I'd start investigating if TikTok algorithm developers got some nudges from a weirdly knowledgeable source.
> <i>The dark forest hypothesis assumes that it's easy to travel between stars, so interstellar conquests are possible. But it doesn't seem to be the case.</i><p>Wrong. Dark Forest isn't about <i>conquest</i>, it's about <i>preemptive strikes</i>.<p>The Dark Forest hypothesis assumes that travel between stars is <i>hard</i> - more importantly, that even <i>communications at those distances is hard</i> - specifically, that it takes a long time, which <i>prevents building trust</i>. This, combined with one other assumption: that technological progress makes unpredictable jumps ahead, makes the conclusion fall out straight from basic game theory.<p>So per the Dark Forest hypothesis, if you spot a primitive agrarian society sending a "hello" to you with smoke signals, you're better off lobbing a nuke at them in response - because otherwise, should you send a friendly "hello back" instead, you may discover that while that message was in flight, they underwent a triple industrial revolution, and shot a magic proton bomb at you.<p>Why would they do that, you ask? Because from their POV, at any moment <i>you</i> can have a sudden technological breakthrough and start dragging black holes at them or whatever. Point being, it's best for <i>them</i> to get rid of you, while they still can.<p>(People get too fixated on the forest metaphor XOR the sci-fi parts, but it's really neither; the second book of the trilogy pretty much spelled out the whole rationale like a math textbook, in case anyone missed it after half of first book making analogies to it with ants and history of modern China and such.)<p>(ETA: what's the justification for "sudden technological jumps" assumption? History. Humanity had ~all the ingredients for the industrial revolution for centuries, and it's not clear why it happened when it did, and not a century or two earlier (or later). Then it happened, but the outcome wasn't "evenly distributed". Then the 20th century saw several large nations jumping all the way from pre-industrial agrarian societies to post-industrial peer superpowers, in a span of merely a few decades. The author writes extensively about living through that transition in the first book.)
The ability to strike itself assumes easy interstellar travel. After all, if you can _destroy_ whole planets and stars, why not just send colonists immediately?<p>Or maybe pre-emptively sterilize everything to make sure your eventual expansion encounters no issues.<p>Moreover, if your first instinct is to strike while hiding, then your equilibrium state would be a civilization that is the most successful at wiping out everything around it, spread all over the habitable universe. Dark Forest just doesn't work from the game-theoretical perspective.
That sounds like an invisible malevolent force trying to destroy us, himm, sounds familiar :).
>>There are no material goods that can justify the material and energetic expense of any interstellar travel.<p>Material, no. but we know with absolute certainty that Earth will stop being habitable for humans at some point. So assuming any intelligent race, human descendent or otherwise, still exists on this planet, it will have to eventually move. It's just pure luck that we evolved when we did. But there are valid reasons for interstellar travel(other than you know, pure curiosity).
I wouldn't characterize it as "moving". Any excursion outside of the solar system will not be done by anything resembling a modern human, full stop. It may be plausible to send some sort of robot with some sort of nanomachine hoo-hah off in the direction of a nearby star, to seed life there. But no living human will ever leave the heliosphere.
Even if leaving the solar system, or whatever system a sentient race exists, were possible, <i>going to war</i> with another sentience in their home turf (which, remember, must first overcome the near impossible hurdles of getting there to begin with) is so unlikely it makes invasion fears absurd. I think the dark forest theory is groundless paranoia.<p>Scifi usually bypasses this by breaking the laws of physics, for the sake of storytelling.
People don't get dark forest at all.<p>Dark Forest isn't about hiding from <i>invasion</i>. It's about hiding from getting preemptively sniped by someone else, worried that one day you may find a reason and a way to snipe <i>them</i>.<p>For this to work out you don't need interstellar colonization to be plausible - merely the ability to accelerate a rock to a significant fraction of the speed of light is enough, and that's definitely much closer to science than fiction.
It's still very impractical though. Sniping everywhere that intelligent life might exist is very low probability, low stakes, and for what reason? You don't have any reason to kill anyone you're unlikely to ever meet. And with a weapon which, by the time it arrives, your civilization might be gone. And for what? You cannot compete for resources you cannot reach. War doesn't work like this, it requires anger and an adversary that you can meet in your lifetime.<p>Dark Forest also assumes aliens aren't curious and thrilled about other life existing out there. The one civilization we are familiar with wouldn't react like this. And we're talking about a very warlike civilization!
It's a catch 22. If you want to preserve the Earth's biosphere or even biological humans, then you would need to move at least a ship the size of a small planetoid. That will support life for millenia that will be required for interstellar travel.<p>And if you can do that, then why bother with the interstellar travel? Just move to a higher orbit to survive the red giant stage. And then move closer to the stellar remnant, white dwarves will provide plenty of energy for trillions of years.<p>And if you manage to transcribe yourself into some kind of computing-based device, then why bother at all?
I think moving a small planetoid and moving a planet are not really comparable technical challenges, are they? Even a small moon like Deimos you could probably move by attaching giant rockets to a side and pushing(absolutely absurd, but let's go with it). How would you move the earth with its atmosphere still intact? Is your rocket stretching out the entire way from the surface to the edge of space?
That's why I never understood sci Fi nerds obsession with outer space, as opposed to inner space. Humans sit about half way between the biggest and smallest things in the universe. Instead of exploring the cosmos, which takes tons of energy and is almost entirely empty, we could be exploring the space between atoms and building worlds without our own world. It is also almost entirely empty, but the energy costs to construct anything would be close to zero.
Observe that ~all sci-fi stories happening in outer space actually don't happen in <i>deep space</i> - there's always a warp drive or a stargate or such used to skip the boring, empty parts, and jump straight to habitable planets and peculiar space phenomena.<p>It's the same as with sailing stories <i>and reality</i> - the interesting parts are everything that <i>isn't</i> the open blue sea.
~all is ambitious.<p><i>Dark Star</i> is one film that directly addresses the long voyage insanity of deep space;<p>* <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Star_(film)" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dark_Star_(film)</a><p>Similarly with sailing films, particularly documentaries, there are films that focus more on the journey than the endpoints. eg: (IIRC) the <i>Kon-Tiki</i> (1950) doco had a lot of mid ocean time.
> <i>That's why I never understood sci Fi nerds obsession with outer space</i><p>I'm sure you do understand it. I mean, sure, the other things you mention are also interesting, but mankind has been awed by a starry night's sky since we were able to look up. We gave names to the arrangements of bright things in the skies and imagined gods in them, and navigated by them. The are awe-inspiring.<p>It's really a human thing, not a scifi nerd's. It's impossible not to look at the stars and wonder. It's human nature.
> <i>It's really a human thing, not a scifi nerd's. It's impossible not to look at the stars and wonder. It's human nature.</i><p>Judging by social media, half the population has an unhealthy obsession about travel and tourism. It's not hard to connect dreams of space to interests of most people here: most stars you look at have planets around them, now imagine some of those are like Earth, and now suddenly this is a place to on a cruise to, to have new pictures to post to Instagram.
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The vast space of everything seems to me that any intelligent life eventually discovers physics to get out of this dimension. Dune space feudalism is unlikely
Good thing those gold plates give aliens the wrong directions to Earth anyway.
For some good portion of the earth's population, I dont think things would go worse than it is even if there were an alian invasion.
I'm firmly against METI, but the Voyagers aren't evenly remotely METI / risky.
Elaborate please.
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.
I'd argue that once you have a very well defined requirement doc that mostly kicks humans out of the picture, as well as a patient boss who doesn't want anything ASAP or "Tomorrow morning first thing", engineering is not that hard, and is almost...enjoyment.
> ASAP or "Tomorrow morning first thing"<p>like in "fast pacing environments" with "flat hierarchies" and "agile mindset"? :-D
A well defined doc evolves over time. it gets sharper with real-world scenarios, incidents, and experiments. Before Voyager 1, we didn’t have that kind of experience. You can’t predict everything upfront.<p>> Theory only takes you so far
I’d argue that you must not be working on interesting problems if you think that “engineering is not that hard”
I think their point is that the challenge becomes more enjoyable than tedious.
Most of us are working on problems that are <i>boring and tedious</i>, not <i>hard</i>.
That's the point. I haven't but I would like to, and I realize that the so called "engineering" problems I work on is NOT real engineering.<p>OK I was probably wrong about that "not hard" though.
Would sending voyager have been a real definite deadline?
Visiting this many planets was only possible due to a very rare alignment. It's a once a century event. That's why we sent two probes, not just one
Absolutely. You could wait decades or centuries for a useful planetary alignment.
Not really. Jupiter alone is good enough. Its huge mass accounts for almost all of the gain you get from any such slingshot. Launch windows from Jupiter to anywhere occur every 12 years. Voyager's alignment was captivating, but realistically if it hadn't happened, we would have just done separate Jupiter-Uranus and Jupiter-Neptune missions instead.
Based on the communication fix, they also didn't have a simulator, or tests, or complete source code, on a custom instruction set that wasn't well documented, so they had to reverse engineer how it worked. <a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcUycQoz0zg&t=2366s" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcUycQoz0zg&t=2366s</a>
That was ballsy! But, sadly, it was a temporary hack. Both Voyager have degrading, unfixable thrusters. The rubber diaphragms in the hydrazine fuel tanks are degrading, shedding silicon dioxide (i.e. sand) microparticles into the thruster fuel. These particles are gradually clogging the thruster nozzles and reducing their thrust. Eventually, thrust will decline to the point that they could fire the thrusters all day long and still not impart enough momentum to point the probes at Earth. Once that happens, we'll lose contact with the probes.<p>They'd switched away from the primary thrusters in 2004 due to this degradation. Now the backups are so degraded that the primary thrusters are better again in comparison.<p>Thruster clogging will kill Voyagers in about five years if nothing else gets them first. The least degraded thrusters nozzles are down to 2% of their diameter --- 0.035mm of free-flow area remaining.<p>The Voyagers will probably celebrate their 50th anniversary, but not much beyond that. :-(<p>Kind of ignominious to be done in not by the inexorable decline of radioactivity but by an everyday materials science error of the sort we make on earth all the time. In the 1970s, we knew how to make hydrazine-compatible rubber. We just didn't use it for the Voyagers.
There is a terrific documentary, 'Its quieter in the twilight', about the aging and dwindling team that still runs both Voyager missions
<a href="https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6L9Du_IFmI" rel="nofollow">https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F6L9Du_IFmI</a>
> Video unavailable
> The uploader has not made this video available in your country<p>I'd love to watch this but unfortunately. My country being AU.
This YouTube video is just a trailer for the documentary, it does look amazing. It looks like the entire documentary is available on some free streaming sites, here's one: <a href="https://play.xumo.com/free-movies/it-s-quieter-in-the-twilight/XM03NY2HJB8KSF" rel="nofollow">https://play.xumo.com/free-movies/it-s-quieter-in-the-twilig...</a><p>If that doesn't work, try using a VPN set to the US as country.
<a href="https://www.itsquieterfilm.com/trailer" rel="nofollow">https://www.itsquieterfilm.com/trailer</a> is the official site.
I think I watched it on Amazon Prime in the USA. I don't know if Oz has Prime or what rights they have.<p>I checked the usual sites on the <i>high seas</i> and it is available for instant download there too :)
Why do some uploaders make it unavailable in certain countries?
Such a wonderful meditation on career and meaning and fellowship and purpose. I loved it.
Very depressing to see this next to the "LinkedIn uses 2.4GB of RAM" post.
Any website that uses more memory than Voyager 1 should be considered bloated.
Takes a lot of resources to track your users rather than just cruising through space
Voyager only needs to track itself. Plus, no ads.
It takes a lot to deliver value at velocity with a team of engineers that couldn't give a damn about the product and just want to get a paycheck, move up the ladder, etc.<p>LinkedIn is not a fun problem.<p>The UI, the design, the dark patterns - all of it sucks.<p>It's a job. Nobody particularly wants to be there. There's nothing sacred about the product. Engineers don't worship it.<p>It isn't a place you'd take a pay cut for the opportunity to work there.<p>Hence the bloat.
""just""
Seems that both of these articles are written by LLMs.
You have to spin it positively: LinkedIn is 350.000 x Voyager.
To be fair. this HN thread useees 40-70 MB of ram in Chrome.
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Here's a photo of the tape recorder:<p><a href="https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-recorder/" rel="nofollow">https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-record...</a>
Reminded me of the anecdote mentioned in the classic "Real Programmer Don't Use Pascal"<p>> <i>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.</i><p>> <i>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.</i><p>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.<p><a href="https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rni/papers/realprg.html" rel="nofollow">https://homepages.inf.ed.ac.uk/rni/papers/realprg.html</a>
> "Many of them know the entire operating system of the Pioneer and Voyager spacecraft by heart"<p>is that actually true? During the voyager memory problems of 2023, I seem to recall that there were significant issues uploading entirely new programs to it because there was so little documentation around the internal workings of the hardware and software, and creating a virtual machine to actually test on was a significant achievement
Duh its space you have to use Turbo pascal
Duh, turbo doesn't work in space. Surely you meant High Speed Pascal!<p><a href="https://www.fihl.net/HSPascal/" rel="nofollow">https://www.fihl.net/HSPascal/</a>
At least Voyager has enough space to carry Turbo Pascal if we wanted to send a copy to our galactic neighbors:<p><a href="https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30644308">https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30644308</a>
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.<p>Result: Your starter program takes 1GB of memory and needs 6 cores to display "Hello, World!"<p>We waste resources, because Moore's Law gave us resources to waste.
There’s a lot of LLM text in that article. It’s very offputting.
Yeah, it’s really starting to depress me how much text published to the web is written using an LLM now. Things that seem interesting at first glance become much less appealing when they have that telltale LLM quality to them, and I also start questioning whether they’re full of factual errors (“hallucinations”). I don’t know why I should spend my time reading something the author couldn’t even be bothered to spend time writing.
Indeed. I also had this weird feeling while reading through the article. It got hooked up in the beginning. And then at some point, my brain just noticed that it was LLM-generated. I wonder how this article was written. Did the author accidentally find about Voyager 1's tiny memory and its primitive tape technology while reading something else, or did he just ask LLMs to write something interesting that he could publish with a few prompts.
Good they launched Voyager 1 before invention of Docker, Electron and NPM projects with thousands of padLefts.
> The phone in your pocket has roughly one million times more memory than the computer running Voyager 1.<p>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.
Android does a lot less stuff in the background than it used to.<p>Initially there were no limitations at all, your app could just do <i>whatever</i>, you ask to start a service, the system runs it for you no questions asked, only kills it if a foreground app needs memory, and then restarts it whenever possible.<p>Modern Android is very strict about this sort of thing in comparison. You only run something in the background if you have a good reason to, and you better display a notification while it's running. Background processes that try to do stuff in the background without telling the system are killed and throttled <i>aggressively</i>.
It's very distracting to have every sentence in this article be its own paragraph.
The estimable (inestimable?) Daniel Estevez wrote excellent blogs on the Voyager comms protocols.<p><a href="https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/" rel="nofollow">https://destevez.net/2021/09/decoding-voyager-1/</a>
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:<p><a href="https://youtube.com/shorts/fssIy-wQisA?si=_HM1fgZKGFfaxWhc" rel="nofollow">https://youtube.com/shorts/fssIy-wQisA?si=_HM1fgZKGFfaxWhc</a>
I enjoyed your video and it is well done. Unfortunately, I don't think it's true. The Voyager tape drives were similar (if not largely identical) to the earlier Viking Orbiters' DTRs. The Voyager engineers were certainly familiar pre-launch with the motions imparted to the spacecraft by the mechanical movements of the tape drive. The Voyager DTRs were specifically mounted to minimize the effects on the roll axis.<p>Potential problem were expected and planned for with Voyager 2's flybys of Uranus and Neptune. Because of the long exposures required for these more distant planets, like you pointed out, the engineers had to account for the attitude effects of both (i) the DTR movements and (ii) panning the cameras to keep them focused on a single point while the spacecraft was moving past at high speed. This was especially a problem at Uranus, which is tilted on its side. Voyager 2 was approaching at its north pole; with the plane of the moon's orbits perpendicular to the ecliptic - like an arrow flying into an archery target. As a result of this configuration and Voyager 2's high speed, the high-resolution observations of Uranus and its moons were compressed into a 6-hour period.<p>These engineering efforts are described in detail in a 1985 paper, "Voyager Flight Engineering: Preparing for Uranus", by W.I. McLaughlin and D.M. Wolff. Abstract: <a href="https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.1985-287" rel="nofollow">https://arc.aiaa.org/doi/abs/10.2514/6.1985-287</a> (The full paper can be found online with some effort; doi:10.2514/6.1985-287) Here's a quote from the paper (AACS is the attitude control computer and CCS is the command computer):<p><pre><code> "The DTR is mounted on the spacecraft such that its angular momentum is introduced into the yaw and pitch axes of the spacecraft with almost none going into the roll axis. DSSCAN was first programmed to introduce cancelling momentum in the yaw axis only. The modification to the AACS and CCS software took place in an environment of a scarcity of available memory so that, from a programming point of view, it had to be carefully fit in. The "patch" was carefully tested in the Voyager Capability Demonstration Laboratory (CDL) before loading onboard Voyager 1. (The AACS and CCS programs were modified without being reassembled as is the case with all AACS and CCS changes since launch.) The CDL is a digital/analog simulation of many of the spacecraft capabilities. Modifications or tests of any degree of complexity are done first, whenever possible, on Voyager 1 before implementation on Voyager 2, a reflection of the fact that Voyager 2 still has two planetary encounters scheduled while Voyager 1 has none."</code></pre>
Thanks! My primary source for this was Carl Sagan's book "A Pale Blue Dot" IIRC — don't have the folder in front of me to double check, but fairly certain.<p>Edit: found it!<p>Here's the excerpt. According to Sagan they sent these instructions up. Given his details on what had to be done to boost the signal upload, it sounds like this really did happen:<p>"...while taking a photograph of a street scene from a moving car.
This may sound easy, but it's not: You have to neutralize the most innocent of motions. At zero gravity, the mere start and stop of the on-board tape recorder can jiggle the spacecraft enough to smear the picture.<p>This problem was solved by sending up commands to the spacecraft's little rocket engines (called thrusters), machines of exquisite sensitivity. With a little puff of gas at the start and stop of each data-taking sequence, the thrusters compensated for the tape-recorder jiggle by turning the entire spacecraft just a little.<p>To deal with the low radio power received at Earth, the engineers devised a new and more efficient way to record and transmit the data, and the radio telescopes on Earth were electronically linked together with others to increase their sensitivity. Overall, the imaging system worked, by many criteria, better at Uranus..."
Thanks for the excerpt. I read a couple of Sagan's other books many years ago and I really should read APBD sometime.<p>Interesting to me, Sagan's "little puff of gas" was borne out in the paper I referenced (not that Sagan needed being borne out!) and that the resulting "imaging system worked ... better at Uranus" was something I hadn't thought of. Per the paper, the Voyagers originally had minimum thruster pulse lengths of 10 ms. In the lab and then on Voyager 1, the Voyager engineers figured out that they could reduce the pulses to 5 ms, thus allowing finer control of Voyager 2's attitude at Uranus (and later Neptune) and probably better image quality than at Jupiter and Saturn. Very interesting - I really should read Sagan's book!
sadly had to stop reading at<p>```
The tape recorder did not fail.<p>The power supply simply could no longer spare the energy to run it.<p>That distinction matters.
```
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.<p>I have a feeling this feat is all about the budget requirements rather than technical feasibility.
Wow! Reading this after watching PHM I almost cried...again.<p>Now, this is what impressed me the most: ""... and wrote software flexible enough to be updated from Earth decades after launch.."<p>OTA patches where invented in the 70's :)
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).
My first computer had 32KB. Reading the headline there's still a part of my brain that went "69KB? Luxury!".
Still amazed how much fun it is to play a 36KB Stargate Defender!
Welcome to the world of embedded systems. They often do not have more resources that that. Even as completely new development (of pool control system or electricity meter).
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'
Man, I'd love to play around with an emulator for that.
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.”
Voyager is an awesome mission. But the AI fingerprint in the piece is a turn off.
surely, the security protocols and radio modulation techniques of the day did not consider a modern-day internet threat landscape. i'm a bit surprised no one has sent their own command signals to Voyager. i'm guessing massive transmit power must be required.
Totally get it. We work on compact binary alerts for constrained links. We have the same obsession with bytes.
Could it run Doom tho?
its the 'ol honda' of spacecraft. definitely one of my favorite human achievements
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.
Voyager is proof that when requirements are stable and systems are simple, longevity follows. We rarely get that luxury today.
Archive link: <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20260329164132/https://techfixated.com/a-1977-time-capsule-voyager-1-runs-on-69-kb-of-memory-and-an-8-track-tape-recorder-4/" rel="nofollow">https://web.archive.org/web/20260329164132/https://techfixat...</a>
Given the LLM on a PDP-11 which had 32KB of RAM, we should be able to install an LLM on this thing.
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 <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly" rel="nofollow">https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly</a> 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.
A phone only has roughly 1 million times the memory, as I am roughly 20 meters tall
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.
We are so detached from the software "engineering" in our jobs that we are amazed when we see it.
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.
Wish javascript devs would read this. If the web is slow, its because of them
Kudos to those NASA engineers for managing to pack React into such a small footprint.
I feel like that's also what's running the backend of Spirit Airlines, but somehow it feels more impressive in the context of Voyager 1.
Very cool, first time reading about the specifics of voyager 1, this is super impressive!
Compared to LinkedIn, which consumes GBs of memory.
i wonder was there a hot debate on whether or not to include Golden record
Voyager 1 and 2 communicate by CB radio.<p><jk>
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.<p>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 :)
A tape with eight tracks, yes. But not the audio cartridge format commonly known as "8-track"; that wouldn't have been suitable to the task. Here's a photo:<p><a href="https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-recorder/" rel="nofollow">https://science.nasa.gov/image-detail/voyager-digital-record...</a>
An old 1970's arcade game, Quiz Show, used an 8-track tape to store the questions and answers. There's a YouTube video about it, and audio dumps of the 8-track on archive.org I think.
<i>What amazes me is the tape lasted almost 30 years</i><p>Yesterday I loaded a program on tape bought at Radio Shack in 1985 into my TRS-80.<p>That's 41 years ago.<p>I suspect the key is using commercial-grade recorders and thick tape.
How could they achieve this with much abstraction?
hehe 69 har har
"That moment was not just a milestone in mission terms. It was a fundamental scientific event."<p>Come on people. This article is straight out of ChatGPT.
Amaze. Amaze. Thank you for sharing.
This is one mighty tape recorder, hats off:<p><a href="https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2053/how-was-magnetic-tape-decay-prevented-in-voyager-1#:~:text=Truth%20is%2C%20I%20worked%20at,vibration%2Dfree%20continuous%20tape%20speed." rel="nofollow">https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/2053/how-was-magne...</a>
I'm just going to repost stuff from my blog about the Voyager space probes. I've posted this here before -<p>The two Voyager spacecraft are the greatest love letters humanity has ever sent into the void.<p>Voyager 2 actually launched first, on August 20, 1977, followed by Voyager 1 on September 5, 1977. Because Voyager 1 was on a faster, shorter trajectory (it used a rare alignment to slingshot past both Jupiter and Saturn quicker), it overtook its twin and became the farther, faster probe. As of 2025, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object ever, more than 24 billion kilometers away, still whispering data home at 160 bits per second.<p>Each spacecraft carries an identical 12-inch gold-plated copper phonograph record.<p>The contents:<p>- Greetings in 55 human languages.<p>- A message from UN Secretary-General at the time and one from U.S. President Jimmy Carter.<p>- 115 analog images encoded in the record’s grooves: how to build the stylus and play the record, the solar system’s location using 14 pulsars as galactic GPS, diagrams of human DNA, photos of a supermarket, a sunset, a fetus, people eating, licking ice cream, and dancing<p>The record is encased in an aluminum jacket with instructions etched on the cover: a map of the pulsars, the hydrogen atom diagram so aliens can decode the time units, and a tiny sample of uranium-238 so they can carbon-date how old the record is when they find it.<p>Sagan wanted the record to be a message in a bottle for a billion years. The spacecraft themselves are expected to outlive Earth. In a billion years, when the Sun swells into a red giant and maybe swallows Earth, the Voyagers will still be cruising the Milky Way, silent gold disks carrying blind, naked humans waving hello to a universe that may never wave back.<p>And it was Sagan who, in 1989, when Voyager 1 was already beyond Neptune and its cameras were scheduled to be turned off forever to save power, begged NASA for one last maneuver. On Valentine’s Day 1990, the spacecraft turned around, took 60 final images, and captured Earth as a single pale blue pixel floating in a scattered beam of sunlight — the photograph that gives the book its name and its soul.<p>It was the photograph that inspired this famous quote -<p>"Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives. The aggregate of our joy and suffering, thousands of confident religions, ideologies, and economic doctrines, every hunter and forager, every hero and coward, every creator and destroyer of civilization, every king and peasant, every young couple in love, every mother and father, hopeful child, inventor and explorer, every teacher of morals, every corrupt politician, every "superstar," every "supreme leader," every saint and sinner in the history of our species lived there-on a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.<p>The Earth is a very small stage in a vast cosmic arena. Think of the endless cruelties visited by the inhabitants of one corner of this pixel on the scarcely distinguishable inhabitants of some other corner, how frequent their misunderstandings, how eager they are to kill one another, how fervent their hatreds. Think of the rivers of blood spilled by all those generals and emperors so that, in glory and triumph, they could become the momentary masters of a fraction of a dot.<p>Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe, are challenged by this point of pale light. Our planet is a lonely speck in the great enveloping cosmic dark. In our obscurity, in all this vastness, there is no hint that help will come from elsewhere to save us from ourselves.<p>The Earth is the only world known so far to harbor life. There is nowhere else, at least in the near future, to which our species could migrate. Visit, yes. Settle, not yet. Like it or not, for the moment the Earth is where we make our stand.<p>It has been said that astronomy is a humbling and character-building experience. There is perhaps no better demonstration of the folly of human conceits than this distant image of our tiny world. To me, it underscores our responsibility to deal more kindly with one another, and to preserve and cherish the pale blue dot, the only home we've ever known. "<p>That picture almost didn’t happen. NASA said it was pointless, the cameras were old, the images would be useless. Sagan argued it would be the first time any human ever saw our world from outside the solar system. He won. The cameras were powered up one last time, the portrait was taken, and then they were shut down forever.<p>Full piece - <a href="https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know" rel="nofollow">https://www.rxjourney.net/30-things-i-know</a>
@claudecode
We need a new round of voyager probes with modern technology. We should be at least trying to reach another solar system.
What happens when hydrazine tanks run out and it can't stabilize anymore to shoot data back to earth? it's over?
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.<p>It was the Neil Armstrong moment for astronomy.
> For the first time in the history of the universe, as far as we know, an object built by a living species had left the protective bubble of its home star system...<p>Seriously?
Decommission. It's not AI ready.
nice
Back then they were efficient.<p>Today we have the slops instead - microslop, autoslop, all-the-slop.
More resources than AOC has.
but can it play Doom?
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so unbelievable that makes you wonder if its all fake.
And what did we get from this space innovation?<p>Not the cheap prosumer high density backup tape drives that we should be able to buy in the stores now.