This is great news and just absolutely amazing what NASA has achieved here. Keep going Voyager(s)!!!
Well in a way Voyager 1 and 2 are bran new relative to the age of the universe.
But for us they are from 1977 which is 47 years old, bombarded by cosmic rays and what not. It’s crazy they still have power.
It’s amazing NASA has succeeded establishing contact again 24 billion kilometers away, they really have some crazy good people working there then and now.TIL that both Voyager craft are still operating, simply amazing.
You might be interested in the documentary “It’s Quieter in the Twilight” about the engineers who keep the Voyagers alive.
Yay!
Imagine you are a machine. Yes, I know. But imagine you’re a different kind of machine, one built from metal and plastic and designed not by blind, haphazard natural selection but by engineers and astrophysicists with their eyes fixed firmly on specific goals. Imagine that your purpose is not to replicate, or even to survive, but to gather information. I can imagine that easily. It is in fact a much simpler impersonation than the kind I’m usually called on to perform. I coast through the abyss on the colder side of Neptune’s orbit. Most of the time I exist only as an absence, to any observer on the visible spectrum: a moving, asymmetrical silhouette blocking the stars. But occasionally, during my slow endless spin, I glint with dim hints of reflected starlight. If you catch me in those moments you might infer something of my true nature: a segmented creature with foil skin, bristling with joints and dishes and spindly antennae. Here and there a whisper of accumulated frost clings to a joint or seam, some frozen wisp of gas encountered in Jupiter space perhaps. Elsewhere I carry the microscopic corpses of Earthly bacteria who thrived with carefree abandon on the skins of space stations or the benign lunar surface—but who had gone to crystal at only half my present distance from the sun. Now, a breath away from Absolute Zero, they might shatter at a photon’s touch. My heart is warm, at least. A tiny nuclear fire burns in my thorax, leaves me indifferent to the cold outside. It won’t go out for a thousand years, barring some catastrophic accident; for a thousand years, I will listen for faint voices from Mission Control and do everything they tell me to. So far they have told me to study comets. Every instruction I have ever received has been a precise and unambiguous elaboration on that one overriding reason for my existence.
-Peter Watts, Blindsight
What a coincidence! I literally started another listen of the audiobook again today, highly recommend it to anyone wanting a cerebral, fascinating sci Fi book The narrator is great, too!
Based on that passage and your description, you gotta read project hail Mary. It’s incredible. It’s like the Martian on steroids
Thanks for the suggestion, it looks interesting! I’ll get it after I’m done re-listening to Blindsight!
How do those nuclear generators work without steam?
The Seebeck effect. The same way a thermocouple works.
Didn’t the small amount of memory they had just completely stop working? I’d love to see or hear how they managed to reprogram this damn thing and make it work again. Amazing.
It did die- one specific chip carrying the code for packaging the data for transmittal died. They kind of described it in this article. So they are now partitioning out the memory left in other parts of the computer system and copying small portions of the packaging code into those other memory blocks so it can still be successfully run.
The fact that any electronic component on this probe still works is just freaking wild.
That’s so crazy, I love this kind of stuff
It’s knowledge has reached the limits of the Universe, and it must evolve…
I wonder what kind of simulators they use to test their code.
Pretty sure they have duplicates of the hardware. That way they are not caught out by subtle differences in the simulation Vs reality.
Yay!!!
First update it sent back:
it has no eyes : itcanstillseemeit has no eyes : itcanstillseemeit has no eyes : itcanstillseemeit has no eyes : itcanstillseemeIt reaches out it reaches out it reaches out
libera te tutemet ex inferis
