Antique Voyager Technology

sea_stuart writes with a story from the Tidbinbilla space tracking station, outside Canberra, Australia. It is still communicating with the two Voyager spacecraft 30 years after they were launched and 18 years after Voyager 2 passed close by Neptune. Here's a little background on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. "The bank of computers that would look at home in black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who cannot be junked... [T]he 1970s hardware is now our world's only means of chatting with two robot pioneers exploring the solar system's outer limits. Today Voyager 1 is humanity's most remote object, 15.5 billion kilometers from the sun. Voyager 2 is 12.5 billion kilometers from it. Both continue beaming home reports, but now they are space-age antiques. 'The Voyager technology is so outmoded,' said Tidbinbilla's spokesman, Glen Nagle, 'we have had to maintain heritage equipment to talk to them.'"

Comments

Re:Useful information?

[fr4nk]

From the Wikipedia article:

If Voyager 1 is still functioning when it finally passes the heliopause, scientists will get their first direct measurements of the conditions in the interstellar medium.

Re:Photos

[FeebleOldMan]

I couldn't find any pictures of the Voyager computer banks, but I found these pictures of old computer banks from the Viking era, which is about a year or two before the Voyager program. The Voyager computer banks would probably look something like this.

Re:I worked on this project

[rimcrazy]

Cassinni is using the same transponders as Voyager. They were "left over" from the original build. The loop caps were replaced. The problem somewhat discussed above is it took FOREVER to qual all of the devices used for the electronics. Once they were finally qualified, they were obsolete. In the case of this specific transponder we (Motorola) actually had to convince TI to restart one of their LSTTL fab lines (for you young whippersnapers you can Google what that is) because we needed some replacement parts and these were qualified and rad-hard so we could not replace them with anything else.

On the Anti-aging we see it all around where US companies are out-sourcing so much technology and the old farts are all being "right sized" or simply retire. In one sense a deep understand of old technology at some point becomes immaterial (Who needs an SXN7 or an AU25.....google that too!) but if the basic problem solving skills are gone to then we are in deep shit if we ever need to do something ourselves.