Posted on 03/29/2018 5:54:55 PM PDT by Enchante
The thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft just did what we thought was impossible. After 37 years of inactivity, NASA just received response from spacecraft 13 billion miles away, NASA said in a statement on its website. Voyager 1 is NASA’s farthest and fastest spacecraft. It was launched on September 5, 1977. Having operated for 40 years, 6 months and 14 days as of March 19, 2018, the spacecraft relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth. These thrusters fire in tiny pulses, or “puffs,” lasting mere milliseconds, to subtly rotate the spacecraft so that its antenna points at our planet. Now, the Voyager team is able to use a set of four backup thrusters, dormant since 1980.
In a statement on its website, NASA said: “The Voyager team assembled a group of propulsion experts at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, to study the problem. Chris Jones, Robert Shotwell, Carl Guernsey and Todd Barber analyzed options and predicted how the spacecraft would respond in different scenarios. They agreed on an unusual solution: Try giving the job of orientation to a set of thrusters that had been asleep for 37 years.”
“With these thrusters that are still functional after 37 years without use, we will be able to extend the life of the Voyager 1 spacecraft by two to three years,” said Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
“The Voyager flight team dug up decades-old data and examined the software that was coded in an outdated assembler language, to make sure we could safely test the thrusters,” said Jones, chief engineer at JPL.
In a further testament to the robustness of Voyager 1, the Voyager team completed a successful test of the spacecraft’s “trajectory correction maneuver” (TCM) thrusters on November 28, 2017. The last time these backup thrusters were fired up was in November 1980. Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd anticipates that successful utilization of the TCM thrusters will extend the Voyager mission by an additional “two to three years”.
Voyager 1’s extended mission is expected to continue until around 2025 when its radioisotope thermoelectric generators will no longer supply enough electric power to operate its scientific instruments.
“Have run out of extension cord. Please add more on your end.”
Where this thing is, there's no moisture, no change in temperature, no change in pressure, no bacteria, no oxygen - absolutely nothing which would cause rust or decay. They SHOULD work after 37 years!
I’m always been fascinated by the atomic battery made by Henry Moseley in 1914. He made 12 batteries by hand. He created a photocell on a small glass microscope slide then bonded 2 of the glass plates together with a spacer around the edge. He filled the inside with a gaseous form of Technetium Fluoride and sealed them up. The technetium gives off radiation and the photocell converts it to electricity. One of Moseley’s batteries was broken in the 50s when someone dropped it while examining it. The others have been putting out about 10 milliamps at a little over a volt continuously since 1914. That’s 104 years. Not bad for a small handmade device the size of a microscope slide.
Going to be a little while yet before it gets to someplace meaningful.
How wonderful for you to read this.
You are one of the many creative people here on FR.
I am so happy to know this about you.
Thank you.
That’s great!! Thx for telling us. so cool..... :^)
Working on the university main frame computers, it would take a number of hours of run time to test each building block much less the full program at once. One of the guys on my team was also taking a computer science class and had learned enough Assembler to add a few lines of code that tilted our access to CPU time so as to reduce our turn around time. Cool! BTW, the 4 teams in that class racked up greater CPU usage than the computer science department as a whole.
That was the last time I wrote FORTRAN code. Logical and generic command tricks I picked up on, I have used off and on over the years to create simplified simulations using spreadsheet software as the framework. First Lotus 123, then Quatro Pro and lastly Excel. It usually drives a spreadsheet bonkers since it thinks there are circular errors when you are working loops to a convergence or other loopy things. Dumb software sometimes but it works.
Oh, sure. They can claim they made this happen at NASA, but how are we to know it isn’t aliens who have boarded the foreign spacecraft trespassing in their part of the solar system and, discovering it was apparently constructed by creatures who might well be very tasty have sent a signal hoping to find out where dinner is being served?
I learned on Fortran, switched to Basic when the class got a new system. Had to learn JAVA to teach a course in AP computer science. Had to learn assembler at Lockheed Martin because one of our subcontractors used it to build a telemetry system. All in all it was a good series of jobs. Had experience on cobol, algol, and VHDL (not technically a software language).
When I got to the part where we taught the history of computers here in Silicon Valley, I realized that I actually used each of the machines as they became the latest and greatest. I recall Voyager too, I believe it carried a record of earth and human designs and a map of quasars that pointed to our star.
“Assembler is the basic way to talk to a processor.”
Is it the same as Machine Language?
I'm guessing it is more sophisticated than “Okay Harry - still no signal, try thruster #3 a titch more.”
I dated a gal back in NJ (heck - she's my wife now!). Her family had a motorized antenna up on the roof, with a little dial by the TV to move it around. If you wanted the news about murder you would aim it towards NYC. For fires you would aim it towards Philadelphia.
Assembly language introduces mnemonic text representations of the various machine level instructions, followed by a human readable sequence of other text mnemonic representations of register names, comma separated numbers if the instruction defines a number (like an address, a number to load into a register, or whatever). Plus, you can add text labels for addresses to jump to, and of course lots of comments to explain what the heck you are doing.
Good example picture of assembly vs. machine language is below:
“Hello, it’s me,
I was wondering after all these years...”
(thanks to Adele)
Thanks! I was good at Machine Language.
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