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NASA receives response from Voyager 1 spacecraft 13 billion miles away after 37 years of inactivity
Tech Startups ^
| March 22, 2018
| Staff
Posted on 03/29/2018 5:54:55 PM PDT by Enchante
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To: PGalt
61
posted on
03/29/2018 7:39:12 PM PDT
by
RckyRaCoCo
(Please Pray For My Brother Ken)
To: Enchante
Poorly written headline, and I didn't bother to do more than scan the article itself.
This article from December of last year explains it better:
Voyager 1 Just Fired Up its Backup Thrusters for the 1st Time in 37 Years
From my referenced article: "Voyager 1 hadn't used its four "trajectory correction maneuver" (TCM) thrusters since November 1980, during the spacecraft's last planetary flyby an epic encounter with Saturn. But mission team members fired them up again Tuesday (Nov. 28), to see whether the TCM thrusters were still ready for primetime."
"Voyager 1 which in August 2012 became the first human-made object ever to enter interstellar space has long been using its standard attitude-control thrusters to orient itself into the proper position to communicate with Earth. But the performance of these thrusters has been flagging for at least three years, so mission team members wanted to find an alternative option."
NASA and Goddard keep track of and communicate with both Voyager craft. You can keep track as well at this URL:
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/
To: Enchante
“Have run out of extension cord. Please add more on your end.”
63
posted on
03/29/2018 7:45:49 PM PDT
by
moovova
To: henkster
its just 37 years since those particular thrusters have been used. Which is still amazing. 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!
64
posted on
03/29/2018 7:51:49 PM PDT
by
PGR88
To: Enchante
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.
65
posted on
03/29/2018 7:57:04 PM PDT
by
BuffaloJack
(Chivalry is not dead. It is a warriors code and only practiced by warriors.)
To: Enchante
To: Enchante
So after 37 years of traveling almost a million miles a day it's gone about 1 light day. So in about 13 thousand or so years it will have traveled one light year. One of the nearest possible earth like planets I think is about 12 light years away if not there then maybe 26 light years away. So in just one hundred and sixty thousand more years it will reach the first possible earth like planet. If that does not work out in about three hundred and sixty thousand years it will reach the next system than may have earth like planets.
Going to be a little while yet before it gets to someplace meaningful.
To: blam
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.
68
posted on
03/29/2018 8:02:53 PM PDT
by
Chickensoup
(Leftists today are speaking as if they plan to commence to commit genocide against conservatives.)
To: teeman8r
69
posted on
03/29/2018 8:06:11 PM PDT
by
Chickensoup
(Leftists today are speaking as if they plan to commence to commit genocide against conservatives.)
To: captain_dave; All
70
posted on
03/29/2018 8:16:46 PM PDT
by
Right Wing Assault
(Kill: google,TWITTER,FACEBOOK,Hollywood,CNN,NFL,BLM,CAIR,Antifa,SPLC,ESPN,NPR,NBA)
To: blam
That’s great!! Thx for telling us. so cool..... :^)
71
posted on
03/29/2018 8:20:23 PM PDT
by
Enchante
(FusionGPS "dirty dossier" scandal links Hillary, FBI, CIA, Dept of Justice... "Deep State" is real)
To: brownsfan
I have positive opinion of Assembler from my college days in the late 70’s. The process design classes for the last 2 semesters each had a semester long project that was the largest component of the grade. For the first semester, the class was in 4 teams with each team of collaborating on an assigned process. It involved code writing in FORTRAN to simulate the production plant front to back, determine optimum equipment sizing, energy and mass balances and capital cost. We ended up with lots of boxes computer cards totaling thousands of lines of code.
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.
To: Enchante
Oh, sure. They can claim they made this happen at NASA, but how are we to know it isnt 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?
73
posted on
03/29/2018 9:19:32 PM PDT
by
Vesparado
(The American people know what they want and they deserve to get it good and hard --- HL Mencken)
To: Hootowl99
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.
To: brownsfan
“Assembler is the basic way to talk to a processor.”
Is it the same as Machine Language?
75
posted on
03/29/2018 9:45:12 PM PDT
by
Dr. Bogus Pachysandra
(Don't touch that thing! Don't let anybody touch that thing!I'm a doctor and I won't touch that thing)
To: Enchante
It prefers to be called vger...
76
posted on
03/29/2018 9:51:07 PM PDT
by
Sicon
("All animals are equal, but some animals are more equal than others." - G. Orwell)
To: Enchante
That's what I thought too - so it raised the issue to me of if it hasn't communicated in 37 years, how would they know how to reorient it to be able to communicate? I can't imagine it would have maintained whatever position it had been in.
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.
77
posted on
03/29/2018 9:54:52 PM PDT
by
21twelve
To: Dr. Bogus Pachysandra
Almost. Writing in machine language would literally mean writing a sequence of binary or hex words to load into memory - i.e. the "object code" in the picture below.
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:
78
posted on
03/29/2018 10:00:54 PM PDT
by
MCH
To: Enchante
“Hello, it’s me,
I was wondering after all these years...”
(thanks to Adele)
79
posted on
03/29/2018 10:07:40 PM PDT
by
Cedar
To: MCH
Thanks! I was good at Machine Language.
80
posted on
03/29/2018 10:27:18 PM PDT
by
Dr. Bogus Pachysandra
(Don't touch that thing! Don't let anybody touch that thing!I'm a doctor and I won't touch that thing)
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