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Antique Voyager Technology

Posted by kdawson on from the spinning-tapes-and-flashing-lights dept.

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.'"

3 of 293 comments (clear)

  1. I've got an old dell they can use... by DragonTHC · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Is it really that impossible to run these machines inside an emulator on a modern server?

    I can still play my atari 2600 games on my xbox.

    --
    They're using their grammar skills there.
    1. Re:I've got an old dell they can use... by arth1 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The problem isn't that a new computer can't emulate the software, it's more that it (a) can't do it out of the box and (b) can't emulate the hardware. If you, say, need a 75/1200 baud serial connection to connect to the tranceiver, it doesn't help that USB or Firewire is much faster. And where do you find a 75/1200 serial connector card for a PC? And how's your PC's EBCDIC character set support, for that matter?
      If you have to design both the hardware and the software, it's going to be expensive. Not to say untested. And with the probes being where they are, it's not like you get a second chance if there's a bug. Things have to work perfectly, every time. You'd have a hard time convincing anyone that your emulation would be perfect enough to replace something that's aced the test of time for 25 years.

  2. The original equipment probabily just works... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Communication with different equipment has been done. http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2006/04/25/2/

    Proof that it's not a problem to receive and decode. Transmit can't be any harder. But why "upgrade" it if they don't have to? The old equipment probably works just fine, so there is no incentive.