Voyager's 35th birthday gift: One-way INTERSTELLAR ticket

The DTR must be a marvel.

The idea of a electro mechanical thing like a tape drive, still working after many, many hours of record, rewind, play, seek, play, rewind etc., is just amazing. And the tape still has some oxide left on it!

Imagine putting your ear to the spacecraft (space being a vacuum an' all) and still hearing the "clunk.. whirr...clunk.... squee-squee-squeee..." noises after all this time.

VGER

...Seeks the creator

35 years old

I have some radios that I bought brand new 38 years ago that still work.

Of course, they're not in a hard vacuum exposed to Cosmic Rays.

?

I'm sure I watched a documentary where the probe returned and nearly destroyed the earth.

Luckily James T Kirk (A descendant of Neil Armstrong I'm lead to believe) was on hand.

Them damn pesky aliens are having a right laugh at us mere humans who still think we are receiving signals from the Voyager craft when really they destroyed them ages ago to stop us finding their home.

"I've just picked up a fault in the AE-35 unit"

Relevant: Computers in Spaceflight: The NASA Experience

Wherein we read among others:

"Manpower estimates for software development ranged from one programmer in 1974 and 1977, with a peak of four full-time programmers in late 1975."

Clearly not an enterprisey solution.

Wake me up ......

... when the restaurant comes into view on the scanners will you.

Awesome achievement...

... but I bet NASA's sorry they caved in and shelled out for the extended guarantee

And the IT angle is...

Well IIRC these are *serial* processors (either true 1 bit at a time or 1 4bit nybble at a time) in MSI CMOS.

Also the *first* time NASA felt brave enough to make the RAM out of CMOS as well (previous vehicles used the rock solid and rock heavy core memory) wired *directly* to the RTG output

All clocked at a brisk 4Khz. That is not a typo and yes that is less than the usual clock on either a digital watch or a pocket calculator.

As for the tape recorders these are not the usual reel to reel type. The data is written in 1 direction and read *backwards* to be sorted out once received back on Earth. New Horizons mission to Pluto will be running at about 1kbs at that range so the data rate from Voyager is even lower.

The Reed Solomon codes used to encode the data are a cousin of the ones used to cope with missing blocks on CD's. Different failure modes but a similar effect.

Monitoring space probes, identifying faults (often from *very* limited telemetry channel data) and devising work rounds is very demanding NASA has developed substantial AI tools to do this. It can't hold a conversation but it can spot when things are out of whack, identify a list of what the causes *might* be and suggest work arounds IIRC.

As for future probes. *if* the NASA work on "Quantum Vacuum Plasma Thrusters" work out we may be seeing the first *real* reactionless propulsion system. IE no *propellant* required.

Which means with enough power and time *any* spot in the Solar System becomes potentially visitable by humans.

The probes will be traveling "forever..."

It's been noted that humans tend to over-estimate future progress the the short and mid term ("Flying Cars by the year 2000", that sort of nonsense), and tend to under-estimate future progress in the long term ("In 200 years we'll have really nice 120-inch LED TVs", etc.).

The implications of this on the Voyager space probes is as follows: In about 500 years, some kids (Earthlings) will discover a historical mention of these space probes on the Interweb Archive. They'll immediately hop into their personal space buggy, race out into interstellar space to find them and bring them back. The ultimate destination of these probes is not some distant star system, but to be disassembled and the parts stuffed under some idiot teenager's bed.

TOPPING THE STAR CHARTS

Voyager 1’s “The Sounds Of Earth”

-- James Ph. Kotsybar

Eleven billion miles from the sun

a record, golden when it left these parts,

a runaway hit on Voyager One,

at Ophiuchus, sure to top the charts,

will introduce Mozart to other stars,

not to mention Berry’s “Johnny B. Goode”.

The knock-offs sold in alien bazaars

will knock their socks off or at least it should

make them extend their eyestalks in surprise.

They’ll soon begin to learn to sing along

to whales recorded and the baby’s cries —

adepts might even master Earth’s birdsong.

Should Beethoven not prove to be their fave,

Then Guan PingHu’s GuQin could be their rave.

Craftsmanship

Something mostly absent in modern life. It seems the more complex things get, the less long they operate. NASA's recent Mars probes do reaffirm my faith though...