NASA's Voyager 1 Is Sending Back Mysterious Data From Beyond Our Solar System
Fascinating.
"......we.....have.....been.....trying.....to.....contact......you.....about......your.....space......ship's.....warranty......"
Oh crap, so now we need to get out the pre-OBDII code reader and try to diagnose this?
This is fine. Nothing to worry about:
The cool things are a) a 45 year old space ship from Earth is still functioning all these years later in the harshest environment we can envision. b) As close as only 14.5 billions miles (0.0025 light years, a spec in galactic, let alone universal terms), away we don't really know E36 M3 about what's out there. It's humbling in a great way about how much we still have to learn.
Beer Baron said:Oh crap, so now we need to get out the pre-OBDII code reader and try to diagnose this?
Gotta jumper the diagnostic terminals with a paper clip and count the blinks.
NickD said:Beer Baron said:Oh crap, so now we need to get out the pre-OBDII code reader and try to diagnose this?
Gotta jumper the diagnostic terminals with a paper clip and count the blinks.
Come on guys. Voygar was built in the 70's in America. This is all the diagnostic equipment you need.
This will give me some perspective when I forget and select "scan all the systems" on the OBD reader (takes bloody forever, relatively speaking) rather than "scan for check-engine codes" (takes a couple seconds).
...It takes light 20 hours and 33 minutes to get to Voyager's current interstellar location, so a round-trip message between the space agency and Voyager takes two days.
Adrian_Thompson (Forum Supporter) said:The cool things are a) a 45 year old space ship from Earth is still functioning all these years later in the harshest environment we can envision. b) As close as only 14.5 billions miles (0.0025 light years, a spec in galactic, let alone universal terms), away we don't really know E36 M3 about what's out there. It's humbling in a great way about how much we still have to learn.
The void of space is pretty harsh but there are a lot of worse environments out there...the surface of Venus makes outer space look like a day at the spa for example.
“Two possibilities exist: either we are alone in the Universe or we are not... Both are equally terrifying.”
–Arthur C. Clarke
I'm somewhat amazed that this piece of expensive tech we built in the 70's is now 45 years old and 14.5 Billion miles away, and we can still talk to it, and it can still send us data. Kudos to the folks that designed this thing and to the people who put it together and shot it off into space.
In reply to 1988RedT2 :
I know, right.
My four year old PoS refrigerator can't even make ice unless I routinely chip the stuck pieces out of the way.
1988RedT2 said:I'm somewhat amazed that this piece of expensive tech we built in the 70's is now 45 years old and 14.5 Billion miles away, and we can still talk to it, and it can still send us data. Kudos to the folks that designed this thing and to the people who put it together and shot it off into space.
I bet the brave berkeleyers patrolling in 688 class submarines would agree with you.
Hey, cool! My Dad worked on Voyager.
The story about them rebooting the 8-track tape that was its CPU made me tear up. Feeling small is feeling good.
1988RedT2 said:I'm somewhat amazed that this piece of expensive tech we built in the 70's is now 45 years old and 14.5 Billion miles away, and we can still talk to it, and it can still send us data. Kudos to the folks that designed this thing and to the people who put it together and shot it off into space.
I think the original engineers who built it still work on it; last I heard, one celebrated their 89th birthday.
Voyager has some 4096 bytes of memory for functions and tasks, so literally they "look" to see what problems are arising within the machine code itself. I still don't understand how it's "processor" works either (technically it's a "logic engine" I think, or was that Pioneer?) but it's entirely possible out in space there's some interstellar wind that is pushing or interfering with the craft now; it's detected it for us before, and we know it's "pressure" now.
It's that old, that far away and still communicating but cel phones are just as old and still drop calls.
What worries me is that on Pioneer 10, we sent nudes and instructions on how to find us.
Am I the only one imagining what I could do with this lift?
VeeGer lives.
Article about the original engineers. Worth the read if you have time, worth looking at the pictures even if you don't.
ShawnG said:What worries me is that on Pioneer 10, we sent nudes and instructions on how to find us.
Good thing Only Fans hadn't been invented yet, eh?
My god!
Its...filled with stars!
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