NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
After some inventive sleuthing, the mission team can — for the first time in five months — check the health and status of the most distant human-made object in existence.
Door #1: 24k of memory 15 billion miles from Earth, literally the humanity’s farthest reach into the cosmos
Door #2: Windows 11, with ads in the search field
Choose wisely.
Real time operating systems are amazing. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Real-time_operating_system
Isn't the apple facehugger a real time computer? I feel like I read that in a teardown but can't find it now.
Why the fuck are we not making more of this
And that one ad probably uses more memory than Voyager has in total 😅
Heh. That "one" ad.
Door #3: Linux.
From a programmer standpoint, it's interesting to hear what the problem was and how they had to work around it.
Must be really frustrating for them, having to work with 49-year-old hardware though, with diminishing memory space for running programs.
I would think it would be an interesting programming challenge. It reminds me of the demo scene where incredible works of art in visuals and audio are done with increasingly small resources. The challenge is to eek out as much performance out of the fewest resources (in specific "weight classes" of limits).
I'm simply astounded by what demo coders can do with, for example, only 4k of RAM.
wait until you find out what they didn't do with shit like websites.
49 year old hardware you're running into living memory issues too.
Great point! I hope the training was good on the baton passing.
Frustrating?! Yeah, no.
It's absolutely insane to think about it. I hope they make the code open one day, it would be nice to see all the patches they had to push several millions kilometres away.
You could probably get it now, although you might have to file a FOIA request. Works created by the Federal government are Public Domain, so unless it's classified for some reason they don't really have an excuse not to give it to you.
That's never going to happen, not only is the code proprietary from whomever manufactured the satellite. But it's also going to be covered under CUI, even if its just a science mission (which it is). Further, the code is covered more broadly under ITAR laws that forbid the transfer of technology outside of the u.s. (which includes this code)
The federal government does not and never will share information about how its satellites operate and work under the hood.
Source, I work for nasa and deal with this exact thing. Please don't spread misinformation unless you actually know what you're talking about.
https://github.com/xieguigang/voyager-1 Is that the code?
shit was checking out the solar system. then it sent us gibberish for a while. now its sending us plans.
I'm ready for Contact to happen IRL
Next Up: Predictions!
The little probe that could.
Hooray! I’m incredibly impressed at the fine work of NASA’s engineers.
What is it engineering up there?
Sad Javascript noises
React is the worst thing I’ve ever seen. Zero websites are better because of it. We were better off writing jQuery. (I do think Svelte is promising. I’m not against the future. Just React.)
Thank god, I can't wait for Voyager to evolve consciousness!
damn, they finally shook off the space gremlins, i was enjoying them.