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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.'"
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.
Even after being flung across the solar system, I am sure Captain Janeway will find a way to repolarize the deflector dish to emit a warp bubble that combined with future Borg technology and that from Species 4971, some old fashioned ingenuity, a transwarp generator, a friendly if dull-witted Talaxian, a half-human half-Klingon baby, a group of Maquis rebels, a hot-shot pilot who doesn't give a damn for regulations, and a hot Borg in a skin-tight leotard will be able to make it back, and the ship will probably be in better condition then when it left!
I'm sorry... I'm bitter...
(32 bits) x (60 seconds) x (60 minutes) x (24 hours) x (365 days) x (30 years) = (30,274,560,000 bits)
(30,274,560,000 bits) / (8 bits) / (1024 bytes) / (1024 KiB) / (1024 MiB) = (about 3.5 GiB over 30 years)
I don't think a modern computer would help, because it's clear that Comcast is seriously throttling their torrent connection.
Not really. As long as you have people who understand the hardware and a supply of old machines for spare parts you should be able to keep things ticking along for decades.
In my last job we ran the entire Melbourne traffic signal system off PDP 11/84's and 83's. Its a good way to keep your wire wrap skills up to scratch.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
The reporter is clueless. It's all a matter of money. It's very expensive to take an old piece of software, written in some obscure language, running on an old machine with a weird architecture, reverse engineer the requirements, rewrite it for a modern machine, and debug and test it thoroughly. You need people who understand the old system and the environment that it ran in. It's usually much cheaper to keep the old hardware running. Plus, many older systems were custom designs, optimized for a particular task, and can still do a better job than more generic modern hardware.
Mea navis aericumbens anguillis abundat
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.
The same software SCATS
That sounds like some pretty shitty software...Failing that, you'd put the software under the DMCA and claim that it was the hd-dvd encryption algorithm. You'd have three different OSS solutions in a week.
(ring) (ring) (click) G'day, this is Tidbinbilla, how can we help?
"Er, Hi, This is Ranesh from Advanced Emulation Solutions... I'm testing the VM you commissioned to replace your legacy communications solution. Thing is, there seems to be an undocumented bug in the command protocol and the remote client has locked up. Could some one pop over and power-cycle the client, please?
****???^^^^!!!!
Hey - take it easy - "no worries" as you guys say - just turn off the power, count to ten and turn it on again!
$$$$!!!!##### !!!!!
Er, 15.5 billion kilometers, you say? Look, I know you guys like to boast about the size of Australia, but...
$$$$ ****ING OUTER SPACE !!!!! MOST DISTANT MAN-MADE ****ING OBJECT !!!!!
Oh. Shit. I wonderered why the ping time was 24 hours.
Don't you guys have on-site support?
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
The reprogrammed Voyager 2 to send color pictures while it had been en route for 15 years allready. Mind you, they reprogrammed Voyager 2 to send *color pictures* made with a system that was built to make b/w pictures. Using a single digit amount of registers to push single bits around a 30 year old computer that has less oomph than todays cheapest calculators aboard a space probe that is a kazillion-billion miles away is quite a stunt. Let alone updating the OS this way to generate color images.
I think these guys know what they are doing and if they choose to keep the old equipment running in order to communicate more relyably with the Voyagers, I trust they have perfectly valid reasons for it. And no, an off-the-shelf Dell is most probably not a feasable replacement. No matter how powerfull it is.
Oh, and by the way: A modern computer would drain voyagers batteries so fast, they'd be dead in a few hours. My old Sharp 1403 H Pocket Computer, built with technology from the early-to-mid 80s runs 200+ hours under full load on a pair of button-cells. I haven't replaced them in 10 years and it still runs on them. I have yet to find a modern handheld computer that can do this.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
Whenever I come across news about the Voyagers, I generally dig deep and read a lot. I am utterly in awe -- of the spacecraft themselves, that they are still functioning, that they are so mind-bogglingly far away, and that humans have created them with the tools of their time. Wow. The link you posted shows in what incredible detail the mission was thought through.
I am very glad that there are still people who monitor and maintain the Voyagers. They deserve it.
"Good news, everyone!"
What is little known externally except by those that actually worked on this project is that the radios work at all is amazing. Motorola GEG built the radios in the Voyager spacecraft. Right after launch of both space crafts there was a failure of a critical capacitor that sets the bandwidth of the acquisition loop filter. The net result of that failure was that the signal acquisition of the radios was severely impaired. In order to compensate for this NASA engineers developed an emperical model of the entire spacecraft while it was on it's initial loop around the sun for it's slingshot to Jupiter. Since it was relatively close they could hit the spacecraft with a very large signal thus ensuring acquisition of the transmitted commands. The model consisted of predicting exactly where the front end input LO would be depending upon the temperature of the space craft, the added doppler due to movement, aging of the crystals, etc, etc. Basically anything that could effect the LO was factored in. Once the model was complete, the ground stations would then use and probably still use, this model to predict what the frequency for lockup needs to be. Due to the efforts of the engineers at NASA, they were able to "save" both spacecraft and the mission. And they still work today!!! Pretty amazing.
"TV, a medium as it is neither rare nor well done." Ernie Kovacs
A typical mainframe of 30 years ago would have done a lot of batch processing. But it still multi tasked. Only an embedded system would have had deterministic timing. And that is true of today as well.
I funded a hitch hiking holiday in Tasmania in 1986 by doing small withdrawals in the middle of the night when ATM's couldn't connect to the banking systems because overnight jobs were running.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Yes, the science community will be rather surprised when the Voyager spacecraft smash into the huge black sphere with the painted stars.
Terrorists can't threaten a country's freedom and democracy. Only lawmakers and voters can do that.
When someone says "Why don't they just", it usually means they have no idea how it's being done, and is just taking that opportunity to show what they know, even though they have no idea if it's applicable.
When someone says "Why don't we just", they're probably working on the project and know what they're talking about.
If they could just, they probably would have justed a long time ago. These are, after all, the people who rebuilt the receiver scheduled to receive the Apollo 11 LEM and EVA transmissions in just 12 hours, after it caught fire 1 day into the mission. It was NASA's call not to use them due to the problem, but they could have done it because they know very well what they're doing and how to do it.
"I may be synthetic, but I'm not stupid." -- Bishop 341-B
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.