NASA figured out how to keep its Voyager 2 probe running for another year (space.com)

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

Ah, good, an opportunity to recommend It's Quieter in the Twilight (2022). Beautiful documentary.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/

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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!')

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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

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.

[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/08/02/1191341035/nasa-voyager-2-spa...

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Minovitch

Source: https://science.nasa.gov/blogs/voyager/2026/08/04/nasa-engin...

Even Voyager can’t retire in today's economy.

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.

Move comments to source? https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49189895

What is this shitshow of a website called space.com ? There's ads, popups everywhere!

Edit: For those who think I'm too harsh: https://imgur.com/a/YkmtOZ9

how do we reconcile this with flat earth theory?

Just asking for a friend

thirty-eight hour ping time, dang

3 AU per year ~ 300 million miles

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- stupid question: how much energy, power and what kind of systems would you need to run something for 80000 years to go all the way to proxima centauri

- how many redudancies would you need, how would it affect the payload?

- what kind of materials?