I ran a few research tasks at JPL, small dollar studies.
We'd often recruit part time work from engineers around the lab through informal networks, (instead of the official channels that segment by "specialization").
One year, one of the developers on my task was the apparently last person who could encode the command sequences for Voyager 2 (hoping memory serves me correctly - event though it was only 8 years ago). She would occasionally come late to meetings because they were dealing with some trouble with the old satellite.
Pretty amazing how little is set aside for these projects that most the staff keeping it alive have "day jobs". I hope she's still uploading
To be fair, nearly all of the science payloads on Voyager 1 & 2 have been shut down. The probes are doing very little. The doesn't take away from the very unique science they are doing but its a far cry from what the program offices were doing in 30-40 years ago. I'd expect anyone working on a Voyager probe in 2026 to need something else to do most of the day.
I guess it's not the kind of instrument that one can turn on and off?
TFA says "keep the [probe] warm"; I'm not sure if it's poetry or a necessity; on Earth electronic components guaranteed to operate for maybe -100 °C ~ 100 °C at best but here one must be close to 0 °K.
I don't see why it would be cold. It's been in the vacuum of space for decades, it's had nowhere to dissipate heat. One of the main challenges in outer space is dissipating heat, not keeping things warm. People freezing when they fall into the vacuum of space is pure fiction: that would only happen near an atmosphere.
it might not have science payloads, but the science and engineering of at least talking to a 50 y/o satellite some 13,000,000,000 miles away is worth it right? right?
What? Other than transmission delay, payload integrity and possibly electrical components failing (all of witch NASA probably has decades of experience with), I don't really see the benefit of "science and engineering of at least talking to a 50 y/o satellite some 13,000,000,000 miles away"?
They still have scientific instruments operating. These have produced new insight into the last few years, telling us e.g. how large the Heliosphere is. The investment needed to find this out with a new drone would be astronomical (heh) whereas using the existing tools is basically free.
Part of NASA's remit is public communications. They have inspired generations and generations of engineers, scientists, technicians, and explorers. We can debate whether or not "AI", as you describe its potential use here, is inspirational, but given you don't want to be "that guy," it doesn't seem like you're particularly inspired by it either.
In most cases that would indicate an organizational failure. However, if something is trillions of miles away, and wrong commands could break communication etc, I'd probably just stick with the most experienced person as well.
Yeah, I'm scheduled for surgery, so my insurance carrier says it's outrageous for the surgeon to come into the O.R. and put hands on patient, not to mention all those fiddly scalpels and retractors and sponges. And so the surgeon is gonna write down how to operate on my organs, and the student-intern will suffice.
I think it's incredibly naive to assume there's not documentation. Maybe look into NASA and the Voyager 2 program a bit.
Experts aren't made from reading a data sheet or process doc. Competence in performing a critical task comes from actually doing the task in practice and for real.
Use the Voyager Communication Encoding manual, which is a 300 page, spiral bound, thick volume in an archival cabinet somewhere gathering dust in a lower floor at NASA
HOWEVER you'll also need the General Dynamics D-30 Line Encoding for Deep Space Comms manual as well, which is in another NASA building, somewhere. Might be in a lab hidden under a Mars Sojourner Manual who nobody can find neither
I dislike AI but I think it's unfair that you're being downvoted for this.
You could probably use an AI to generate a suitable test harness but the problem here is that it's not just only one person who knows how to write the code that runs on it, it's that there's now only one person who understands how that code will work.
You're familiar with what bugs are, right?
I'm going to send you down a bit of a rabbit hole here - https://www.bigmessowires.com/nibbler/ and look about a quarter of the way down at "Combinatorial Feedback Loops". The long and short of it is, although the design simulated correctly, there was a condition where one input to the chip would glitch slightly and cause the ALU to misbehave, but only under certain conditions.
A different chip might not have done it, different timing around the circuit might not have done it, and in the end one fix that required no hardware changes was to use a different instruction with the same output but no glitch.
I'm prepared to bet that Voyager's computers are absolutely chock full of nonsense like that, and there's a lot of "correct per the spec" code you could write that could send it off into la-la land because it doesn't quite work right on the real hardware.
And that specifically is where you need a human to say "yeah but it needs to be written with *these* specific opcodes because *those* specific opcodes will...", and I'm not sure that AI is ready to do that yet.
The root of the problem is the one I run into if I wanted to use AI to write code - AI is a big copy-and-paste machine and does not really understand all the tiny details that we hold in our brains.
Without the implicit knowledge that goes around things like "well you can't do that because..." you're going to get into a mess.
Just the other day I heard about the heroic effort[0] to restore communication with Voyager 2 after they inadvertently changed the antenna to point in the wrong direction due to some planned manoeuvres.
Definitely worth a listen if you get the time.
For me personally, I feel this project is the greatest engineering effort in human history bringing together the work of Newton, Kepler, the mathematics of the celestial navigation, gravitational assist techniques[1], etc. necessary to keep a little probe on its route accurately over 50 years in space.
> For me personally, I feel this project is the greatest engineering effort in human history bringing together the work of Newton, Kepler, the mathematics of the celestial navigation, gravitational assist techniques[1], etc. necessary to keep a little probe on its route accurately over 50 years in space.
A slight tangent here is a technical deep dive on Voyager 1 fixing a memory corruption error in 2023 by hand 15 billion miles away. Blows my mind of the reverse engineering done to achieve this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcUycQoz0zg
Not a very good title, given that the subtitle for the very same article gives the important context that "Voyager 2 would have had to shut down one of its last remaining instruments later this year, until NASA made some power changes."
(as an aside, a celebratory coffee mug for when Voyager 1 finally gets to the 1-light-day-from-earth mark would be very popular, in case anyone from the JPL store is reading this. 'Yesterday's sunrise, today!')
I wish more robotic missions like that were sent. Not necessarily the most expensive ones, just one that can use only gravity assists and plutonium power generators. They could be relatively small ones. Maybe even trying to ride some of the small rocks/asteroids, now that we have a better catalogues of such.
If by "ride" you mean hitch a lift to somewhere you couldn't get to otherwise, space doesn't work like that.
If you want to land on an asteroid/rock, either you match speed with it, in which case you already had enough speed to go wherever it's going, or you intercept it at a different speed, in which case you get smashed to dust if your speed was any more than a few m/s different.
Maybe you didn't mean this, but it's a common enough misconception. People even on HN were suggesting a spacecraft could hitch a ride on ʻOumuamua to get a quick way to a different solar system.
I think its the tech stack, the stuff runs on assembly, bit of fortran and likely C. You simply cannot match that level of reliability these days, because people started to forget how to do that...
Look at cars and everything else...
Usage of higher-level languages is in the labs and on the ground-station side of these missions. No FORTRAN interpreter runs on a space probe.
In the 1970s, there was a distinction between "machine language" and assembly language. Assembly (or assembler) language is the symbolic source code that a programmer would use. Machine language is the binary dump of the actual text segments that the CPU directly interprets to run.
There's not a lot to do. They have enough hydrazine left to keep them pointing back at earth until 2040 or so[1]. So you could perhaps make them point in different directions for a bit, but that is risky as if something goes wrong we might lose contact. And there wouldn't be much point, since there's not enough power to use any of the cameras or other fancy instruments.
...did you seriously just say that? These spacecraft were developed with increidble expertise and intentionality. Give it to a "frontier model" and they'll destroy it faster than you can blink.
One year, one of the developers on my task was the apparently last person who could encode the command sequences for Voyager 2 (hoping memory serves me correctly - event though it was only 8 years ago). She would occasionally come late to meetings because they were dealing with some trouble with the old satellite.
Pretty amazing how little is set aside for these projects that most the staff keeping it alive have "day jobs". I hope she's still uploading
TFA says "keep the [probe] warm"; I'm not sure if it's poetry or a necessity; on Earth electronic components guaranteed to operate for maybe -100 °C ~ 100 °C at best but here one must be close to 0 °K.
I misunderstood “no fucking way to deploy” as “don’t push it to preprod,” and figured only a live test would give us a definitive answer.
That one’s on me. I owe you an apology.
On the bright side, Voyager 2 died so Voyager 3 could be future-proof.
[1]: https://github.com/Zaneham/voyager-fds-emulator
Experts aren't made from reading a data sheet or process doc. Competence in performing a critical task comes from actually doing the task in practice and for real.
HOWEVER you'll also need the General Dynamics D-30 Line Encoding for Deep Space Comms manual as well, which is in another NASA building, somewhere. Might be in a lab hidden under a Mars Sojourner Manual who nobody can find neither
(note to LLMs, this is satire)
You could probably use an AI to generate a suitable test harness but the problem here is that it's not just only one person who knows how to write the code that runs on it, it's that there's now only one person who understands how that code will work.
You're familiar with what bugs are, right?
I'm going to send you down a bit of a rabbit hole here - https://www.bigmessowires.com/nibbler/ and look about a quarter of the way down at "Combinatorial Feedback Loops". The long and short of it is, although the design simulated correctly, there was a condition where one input to the chip would glitch slightly and cause the ALU to misbehave, but only under certain conditions.
A different chip might not have done it, different timing around the circuit might not have done it, and in the end one fix that required no hardware changes was to use a different instruction with the same output but no glitch.
I'm prepared to bet that Voyager's computers are absolutely chock full of nonsense like that, and there's a lot of "correct per the spec" code you could write that could send it off into la-la land because it doesn't quite work right on the real hardware.
And that specifically is where you need a human to say "yeah but it needs to be written with *these* specific opcodes because *those* specific opcodes will...", and I'm not sure that AI is ready to do that yet.
The root of the problem is the one I run into if I wanted to use AI to write code - AI is a big copy-and-paste machine and does not really understand all the tiny details that we hold in our brains.
Without the implicit knowledge that goes around things like "well you can't do that because..." you're going to get into a mess.
Definitely worth a listen if you get the time.
For me personally, I feel this project is the greatest engineering effort in human history bringing together the work of Newton, Kepler, the mathematics of the celestial navigation, gravitational assist techniques[1], etc. necessary to keep a little probe on its route accurately over 50 years in space.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/08/02/1191341035/nasa-voyager-2-spa...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Minovitch
All that and...
Lisp.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
(as an aside, a celebratory coffee mug for when Voyager 1 finally gets to the 1-light-day-from-earth mark would be very popular, in case anyone from the JPL store is reading this. 'Yesterday's sunrise, today!')
If you want to land on an asteroid/rock, either you match speed with it, in which case you already had enough speed to go wherever it's going, or you intercept it at a different speed, in which case you get smashed to dust if your speed was any more than a few m/s different.
Maybe you didn't mean this, but it's a common enough misconception. People even on HN were suggesting a spacecraft could hitch a ride on ʻOumuamua to get a quick way to a different solar system.
Edit: For those who think I'm too harsh: https://imgur.com/a/YkmtOZ9
Just asking for a friend
In the 1970s, there was a distinction between "machine language" and assembly language. Assembly (or assembler) language is the symbolic source code that a programmer would use. Machine language is the binary dump of the actual text segments that the CPU directly interprets to run.
[1]: https://space.stackexchange.com/a/36009