Voyager Set To Enter Interstellar Space

Phoghat writes "More than 30 years after they were launched, NASA's two Voyager probes have traveled to the edge of the solar system and are on the doorstep of interstellar space. Today, April 28, 2011, NASA held a live briefing to reflect on what the Voyager mission has accomplished — and to preview what lies ahead as the probes prepare to enter the realm of the Milky Way itself."

Comments

Let me say

[milbournosphere]

Congratulations to the engineers working on the original project all those years ago. I couldn't fathom designing something like this with the toolset they had 30+ years ago. Props to them for creating a set of probes that are still relevant 30 years after their launch.

Re:Let me say

[www.sorehands.com]

An example of reliable code and engineering.

It is a shame that programmers and engineers do not design and code their products so that they will be reliable.

How many times did they have to reboot Voyager?

Re:Let me say

[Pseudonym Authority]

It may have been a less advanced toolset, but the mindset back them was what really made it work. Back then, anything was possible, even expensive research unlikely to have any direct benifits. Now? If it isn't going to make a profit next month, trash it. Fuck the modern era. We did more with slide rules and determination than we do now with modern technology.

Re:Let me say

[Anonymous Coward]

You know, they weren't club-wielding savages in loincloths back then.The most important tools they had back then were:

1) A university system that wasn't designed to maximize profit therefore bringing in anyone into EE. Only actual engineers made it back then. The engineer working on the other system wasn't a dumbass.

2) Computers and software were simpler and easier to understand instead of the morass of chaotic, barely-functioning layers of unknown code we have today.

3) They had SPICE back then!

4) Plenty enough technology to do what was needed.

Re:Let me say

[euroq]

You forgot to post as an anonymous coward.

Re:Let me say

[syousef]

Does every conversation on slashdot have to turn into a tirade about how stupid and frustrating and awful and shoddy and worthless and disappointing and shitty and aggravating and horrible windows is? We know already! It's also despicable and unreliable and saddening and ugly and untrustworthy and pernicious and inadequate and etc etc etc...

Take your blinkers off. It's not just Windows.

Re:Let me say

[Anonymous Coward]

The thing is *NONE* of the other OS's are 'reliable' either. Linux is a huge conflicted mess of leet devs trying to come up with ever cooler interfaces. Mac keeps changing itself just enough so no one wants to write software for it. And windows dont get me started...

Just works is all I ask. After my 5th blue screen of the day because of some f'n driver I am a bit pissed.

(hey you started it :))

Re:Let me say

[md65536]

But the modern version would automatically update its Twitter account from space!

Re:Let me say

[FlyingGuy]

More then likely written in pure Assembler or Machine Code. Hand Debugged, Hand Optimized back when software engineers were programmers in the very real sense of the word.

Although unconfirmed AFAIK the whole thing is run on a RCA CDP1802, also known as the COSMAC (Complementary Symmetry Monolithic Array Computer) and at this moment the entire spacecraft runs on +/- 275 watts of power at 30 Volts DC which is pretty damn amazing.

Put that in your god damn JVM/Python/PHP/Erlang/Lang De Jur pipe and smoke it ya damn weenies!

Re:Let me say

[Anonymous Coward]

And as we all know, spice is an important part of space travel.

Re:Let me say

[somersault]

He meant "modern programmers" in his second sentence. Pretty obvious.

Re:Let me say

[slapout]

And slide rules! Don't forget the slide rules.

Re:Let me say

[slew]

How many times did they have to reboot Voyager?

In case you didn't know, it wasn't a reboot, but there was a problem where they actually did have to live patch the voyager 2 computer last year for a bit-flip problem...

Of course this was discussed previously

Although that's impressive, in general, the SW architecture of voyager is quite complicated and fragile, and during the operation, several mistakes have been made one of which caused the primary receiver on Voyager 2 to be accidently shut down, never to work again (so it's relying on a backup which has a faultly frequency tuning circuit which they compensate in software).

It's really only heroics which keep these probes up and running. The original engineering, while impressive, is really not the thing that's keeping things working now...

Re:Let me say

[infolation]

The gold phonograph contains a recording of the brain waves of a young woman in love.

Re:Let me say

[Brett Buck]

I am not quite sure what you are talking about in terms of "toolset they had 30 years ago". There have been relatively few relevant improvements since then. The only thing that is better is computer processing power, and that is very much a mixed blessing.

Re:Let me say

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Does every conversation on slashdot have to turn into a tirade about how stupid and frustrating and awful and shoddy and worthless and disappointing and shitty and aggravating and horrible windows is? We know already! It's also despicable and unreliable and saddening and ugly and untrustworthy and pernicious and inadequate and etc etc etc...

Take your blinkers off. It's not just Windows.

Fine. Would you pay $1,000 for a DVD player that will last 20+ years?

Re:Let me say

[stuckinarut]

Genuinely a brilliant lifetimes work, here's a nice write up by the LA Times on Ed Stone the Voyager lead scientist.

Re:Let me say

[PPH]

And slide rules! Don't forget the slide rules.

I won't. I was sitting in the coffee shop, figuring some stuff out with one just the other day.

Re:Let me say

[datapharmer]

My Dad gave me his record player from the 70s. It is a direct drive pioneer, and works just fine to this day. It also didn't cost $1,000 - not even when adjusted for inflation. I asked him, but he said he didn't own a DVD player back then, but the 16mm films he has still play fine too. They didn't cost $1,000 either.

Re:Let me say

[ObsessiveMathsFreak]

They also loved in an age where beating the Soviets in science and technology was considered more important than building the next iDink consumer device, or concocting some alchemical algorithm for market traders.

The best talent available to us is being wasted on pointless commercialism.

Re:Let me say

[Anonymous Coward]

Web 2.0 sucks too. Like now on slashdot if I feel like reading an article without logging in because I'm on a different computer or for whatever reason, I can't make the slider move so that I can see all the comments. I have to click on each one to expand it. But I like to read without having to opt in to read every comment. It's a lot more effort and detracts from what I want to do, which is concentrate on reading the comments (ALL the comments), without having to keep my hands on the mouse pad to click on each hidden comment. Why do the slashdot editors want to take away my choice of how to read the site, forcing me to log in, forcing me to undergo artificial delays before posting if I choose not to log it? Slashdot was much better in the old days :(

Re:Let me say

[MichaelSmith]

I was lucky to find a copy of Carl Sagan's book Murmurs of Earth in my local library years ago. It is a fantastic read and I would recommend it to anybody.

Re:Let me say

[datapharmer]

Seriously. Let me know how your i7 holds up to space radiation....

Re:Let me say

[The_REAL_DZA]

You know, they weren't club-wielding savages in loincloths back then.

Stone knives and bearskins, son, stone knives and bearskins. And that's the way we liked it, too! None of this mamby-pamby object-oriented whoopsiedoodle; we entered our code changes by tapping out ones and zeros under a microscope (optical, of course, you insensitive clod!) using a cat's whisker. Why, I'd give you a real old-school lesson in how-to-get-it-done-and-done-right-the-first-time-ness, but I've gotta go chase some darned kids outta my yard!!

Re:Let me say

[Toam]

"Just passing Uranus LOL"

Re:Let me say

[Anonymous Coward]

Voyager FAQ answers the question "What kind of computers are used on the Voyager spacecraft?" It's more detailed than the lay explanation I expected — very interesting indeed!

Re:Let me say

[Nyeerrmm]

If you're referring to the SPICE toolkit, we're even still using it.

Re:Let me say

[nanospook]

You had a keyboard? We didn't have one, we just tapped the two wires together in morse code to control the keypuncher monkey thing..

Re:Let me say

[bsDaemon]

Don't you mean "read yourself when you type" ?

Re:Let me say

[dissy]

It is a shame that programmers and engineers do not design and code their products so that they will be reliable.

But on the other hand, I can't say I am willing to pay $2 million for a copy of Windows, which is likely the cost per user if it really was designed by the same people and to the same standards as the Voyager code.

It's not cheap to design and develop bug free code. NASA had some very smart people working on these problems for quite some time.

Granted, there are plenty of areas outside of commercial software like Word, where reliability is not just important but critical. While a good amount is designed well and quite reliable, I'll admit it is not as often as it really should be. The insanely huge cost is justified.

Re:Let me say

[Nursie]

"It is a shame that programmers and engineers do not design and code their products so that they will be reliable."

Speak for yourself.

Some of us take pride in our work and write fast, reliable software that runs on servers for multiple years without interference.

Re:Let me say

[FrankDrebin]

You have a decent point, but a very important, unmoveable deadline also kept the engineers on track: the alignment of the outer planets imposed a certain launch window.

Re:Let me say

[abigor]

Bang on.

Re:Let me say

[Daniel Dvorkin]

we entered our code changes by tapping out ones and zeros under a microscope (optical, of course, you insensitive clod!) using a cat's whisker

You had cats?

Re:Let me say

[yodleboy]

they are all designed to wear out. We usually throw on a DVD each night when we go to bed. We would set the sleep timer on the TV so it would power off, but the poor DVD players had no such option. They'd finish the movie, then spin the disk all night long displaying the menu. Inevitably, they'd burn out. We've probably gone through 7 or 8 dvd players in the bedroom. When we decided to throw a blu-ray player in there we did what we SHOULD have done from the beginning. We got a timer for the outlet and set it to kill the power for 5 min every night at 1 AM.

Would I have paid more for a dvd player with bomb proof internals, sure. Unfortunately, we tried a range from $25 dollar cheapies to a $200 one and there was never any rhyme or reason to how long before failure. The shortest time was about 3 months, the longest probably 2 years for a midpriced one we got at Frys.

So, in the end we've found a way to stop eating players (that and watching a lot of netflix helped) . HOWEVER this could have all been avoided with a few lines of code to add a sleep timer, or to turn the thing off if it's been sitting at the root menu for more than an hour would have gone a long way and I was always frustrated that no DVD player seemed to have this. Of course, the faster it dies (without being TOOO soon and ending up a warranty item) the faster you pay to replace it...

Re:Let me say

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Of course they still work, both of those devices are infinitely simpler than a DVD player. Niether are a testament to excellent engineering.

That, however, was not the question. I'll rephrase it if it helps: If a company would guarantee that a DVD (or even Blu Ray) player would last 20 years, what's the maximum you would pay?

Re:Let me say

[Surt]

I have never owned a dvd player without those features. I think you had particularly bad luck in your choice of players.
My current main dvd player is 7 years old, and we leave the discs in pretty much always. It powers down after an hour of idle I think.
(Toshiba btw).

Re:Let me say

[Anonymous Coward]

From your link:

The 1802 has often been incorrectly claimed to have been used in the earlier Viking and Voyager spacecraft, but it was not available at the time those spacecraft were being designed, and primary sources describe the Viking and Voyager computers as having architectures very dissimilar to the 1802, and not being microprocessor-based.

Re:Let me say

[Relayman]

"with the toolset they had 30+ years ago." I got a Java programmer to admit that bad code today is much worse than the bad code of the '70s and the '80s. I believe that the today's toolsets contribute to that.

Re:Let me say

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

Is that really a use case that is going to cause a huge turnaround?

Re:Let me say

[Mogusha]

Would probably be even more expensive given the number of features implemented in Windows.
The voyager probe code was most likely entirely purpose written, which is much easier to manage than something like windows which is designed for third party programs and tries to allow for general purpose computing.
Although, there are a few things that could be done to improve some reliability, even in old c++. Although I'm sure there might be difficulties with platforms other than x86. Like using -1 instead of 1 as "true". Thereby having all 1's set instead of a single bit which, in theory, could change.
But in reality, there's probably more issue with programmer's bugs than hardware issues.
One major question that I have had is why has the standard library not been expanded over the years. Code reuse is one of the best ways to reduce working bugs in pretty much all code. Although that's probably a result of many patent and IP issues. :/

Re:Let me say

[flappinbooger]

Yet ... to get philosophical, achieving true longevity in a design isn't simple, is it? Is it luck? Brilliance? Trial and error?

My point is that the fact that the thing is still on at all deserves quite a lot of credit to the original engineering. Even if it is fragile and has required work to keep going - it is still ... on.

Who deserves more credit? The guys that have figured out the system updates and changes to KEEP it going, or the people that designed the thing so well in the first place that it has lasted long enough so that there is a thing to even keep going?

Re:Let me say

[schnell]

the mindset back them was what really made it work. Back then, anything was possible, even expensive research unlikely to have any direct benefits.

I think what you really mean is that the Cold War funding climate made it possible for politicians to vote to fund those things. Today, with Moody's on the threshold of downgrading US credit, nearly every state running massive deficits and every penny of the Federal budget being fought over, you're damn right that no politician in the US is eager to fund "expensive research unlikely to have any direct benefits." And frankly that may not be a bad thing. Maybe one of those other countries that I keep hear is beating the US soundly in science can fund that research for a change while we return to solvency, and we can all benefit from the knowledge.

Re:Let me say

[Malnar]

It is called planned obsolescence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

Re:Let me say

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

It is called planned obsolescence: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Planned_obsolescence

It's hard to lay the blame on manufacturers when people flock to the newest upgrade. Which.... gets back to my question: How much would you actually pay to get a 20-year DVD player? I bet the answer is none and the reason for that is you're thinking of going Blu-Ray or streaming or whatever new whiz-bang thing comes along.

The real word you're looking for is 'consumerism'.

Re:Let me say

[Jeremi]

Has said Java programmer actually looked at much code from the '70s and the '80s? (and I don't mean the 70s/80s code that is still in use today... I mean the stuff that got used for a few years and then thrown away)

Re:Let me say

[Surt]

Except for all the modern technology, of course, right?
The reality is, we're building much better stuff today than our parent's generation did.

Re:Let me say

[Holi]

If you could sell me a 20 year old DVD player I would buy it in an instant for $1000 especially since the first DVD player was introduced in 1997. Hell I would demand all of Phillips income for the past 14 years.

DVD was launched in 1997.

Re:Let me say

[Holi]

Lets just admit I should never post on slashdot after going to a 5 hour wine tasting

Re:Let me say

[bakes]

GPP did not mention Windows. You did.

Re:Let me say

[syousef]

Of course they still work, both of those devices are infinitely simpler than a DVD player. Niether are a testament to excellent engineering.

That, however, was not the question. I'll rephrase it if it helps: If a company would guarantee that a DVD (or even Blu Ray) player would last 20 years, what's the maximum you would pay?

You're just trying to be difficult. I have a CD player from the 80s that still works. Can't give you an exact year - somewhere around '84 to '86. It was sold with a tuner and turndeck. Together they cost around $350. The CD player would have been less than half of that. Yes that was a lot of money at the time but not comparable to $1000 today. And I wasn't the only person that bought it.

Re:Let me say

[khallow]

Yet ... to get philosophical, achieving true longevity in a design isn't simple, is it? Is it luck? Brilliance? Trial and error?

Maintenance and trying out a lot of designs.

Re:Let me say

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

You're just trying to be difficult

No, I'm trying to put it into perspective.

I have a CD player from the 80s that still works. Can't give you an exact year - somewhere around '84 to '86. It was sold with a tuner and turndeck. Together they cost around $350. The CD player would have been less than half of that. Yes that was a lot of money at the time but not comparable to $1000 today.

You paid the equivalent of $700 for that setup. Did you pay that for your current media or audio center? People just barely pay that for a game console with an expected life of less-than-5 years.

And I wasn't the only person that bought it.

True. They would not have become ubiquitous otherwise. However, that market really wasn't sustainable, was it? Not in light of how many more people paid for cheaper versions of it. As time goes by, the desire to upgrade these components will go up as new fancy ways to use digital processors become fashionable. Again, this is the market dictating this, not the manufacturers. If it were the latter, we'd still have all those little repair shops all over the place like we did in the 80's.

Re:Let me say

[Greyfox]

I'm sure they do in NASA. They probably don't let dumbasses in there. You can design a system and write masterful code and it's easier to do today than it was two or three decades ago. It's just that most of the programmers don't. Most of the programmers wrote shit code back then too. Hardware may have been more reliable back then, but it was a lot less functional than it is today, too.

NASA systems are usually very overengineered. We could make your PC never need rebooting if you set up rendundant systems in the system with failovers and mirrored memory, but it'd cost several times as much. Telco switches that need to achieve five nines of reliablity are designed like that, and each redundant system board will set you back 30 grand.

Re:Let me say

[Jedi Alec]

Really not all it was cracked up to be? RT @Voyager Just passing Uranus LOL

Re:Let me say

[SixDimensionalArray]

Congratulations to the engineers working on the original project all those years ago.

I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Ed Stone at a recent NASA event, one of those chief engineers, if only briefly. It really is stunning to think of these most-distant man-made objects and what it must be like where they are.

When I asked him how he felt knowing that something he worked on was so far away, his answer was quite short and honest in a humble engineering sort of way: "pretty fantastic"! So absolutely fantastic, indeed!

Whence has the spirit of exploration gone, and how can we keep it strong?

Oh, and when was the last time it needed a reboot?

-6d

Re:Let me say

[syousef]

You paid the equivalent of $700 for that setup. Did you pay that for your current media or audio center? People just barely pay that for a game console with an expected life of less-than-5 years.

Yes, for the whole setup. A full stereo, not just a CD player. That included a tuner, turntable, 2 speakers, an amp, and control panels including an equalizer. The CD player was probably worth $200-$250 of that $700. And you would pay that today for a good Blu-ray player. Blu-ray now is at about the same point that CDs were when I bought in.

So your quote of $1000 for a DVD player is a huge and ridiculous exaggeration. Quality control does not increase price by 2 orders of magnitude, and old tech gets cheaper as factories tool up and familiarity is gained with the ins and outs of the format.

And I wasn't the only person that bought it.

True. They would not have become ubiquitous otherwise. However, that market really wasn't sustainable, was it? Not in light of how many more people paid for cheaper versions of it. As time goes by, the desire to upgrade these components will go up as new fancy ways to use digital processors become fashionable. Again, this is the market dictating this, not the manufacturers. If it were the latter, we'd still have all those little repair shops all over the place like we did in the 80's.

The market is quite sustainable. People haven't stopped buying gadgets. More people are able to afford them etc.

The reason that you had little repair shops all over the place was that it cost more to replace than to fix. One reason for that was that quality control hadn't been thrown out the window. Today a manufacturer will put out shoddy rubbish to save $2 a unit. Most customers would pay an extra $2 for something that worked properly and lasted so blaming the consumer is just ridiculous misdirection. The blame lies squarely with manufacturers who refuse to back the quality of their products and instead compete on price point. The first few shoddy products ruin that manufacturer's reputation and they find they can no longer compete on quality.

Re:Let me say

[rhook]

After my 5th blue screen of the day because of some f'n driver I am a bit pissed.

(hey you started it :))

Perhaps you should try upgrading to a modern version of Windows? I cannot remember the last time Windows crashed on me.

Re:Let me say

[IntentionalStance]

A friend of mine led the development team that built the onboard software for the Huygens probe. The QA cycles they went through would be insane for any normal project.

For example they gave the compiled code to a completely separate team and got them to reverse engineer the specifications.

This uncovered a Y2K bug in the ADA runtime that the code was built on

As the test driven development mantra goes - test until you aren't scared any more
Knowing that your code will be run once and only once in production, there's no second chances and that the box it's running on is some 10's of light hours away makes you rather easily scared

Re:Let me say

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

> You had a keyboard? We didn't have one, we just tapped the two wires together in morse code to control the keypuncher monkey thing..

I once had a keyboard rained on while in the middle of the forest with no chance to get a replacement for a while. I took it apart and figured out the shorts I had to make in the controlling circuit board to enter the password with a paperclip...

Re:Let me say

[IntentionalStance]

It may have been a less advanced toolset, but the mindset back them was what really made it work. Back then, anything was possible, even expensive research unlikely to have any direct benifits. Now? If it isn't going to make a profit next month, trash it. Fuck the modern era. We did more with slide rules and determination than we do now with modern technology.

Nope re the mindset back then. I was coding for living back then and the ratio of good developers to bad developers is still pretty much the same now. Go and read the Mythical Man Month. What's sad is not that 'we were better at this stuff in the good old days' but that we, as an industry, haven't learned how to do things better having had 30 years of practice.

Re:Let me say

[Kagura]

Don't you mean "read yourself when you type" ?

How can I read myself? I'm not words.

Re:Let me say

[sincewhen]

Correct. But mostly Windows.

Re:Let me say

[Hognoxious]

They also loved in an age

Ah yes, the 1960s. Peace, man!

Re:Let me say

[roman_mir]

A university system that wasn't designed to maximize profit

- false. The university system was always designed to maximize profits. What they did not have was government giving loans left right and center, thus increasing the demand in nominal terms, while destroying the currency and forcing tuition fees up, while simultaneously driving savings and thus the investment capital out to other places, that wanted that capital more and weren't punishing people for success in business. The only driving force behind innovation is need that comes out of the market and causes manufacturers to compete. When you have government money simultaneously increase the demand while shifting supply elsewhere, expect that other place to increase innovation and wealth, while your place only to increase consumption and debt.

Re:Let me say

[w0mprat]

Congratulations to the engineers working on the original project all those years ago. I couldn't fathom designing something like this with the toolset they had 30+ years ago. Props to them for creating a set of probes that are still relevant 30 years after their launch.

Yes because if it was built in 2011 it wouldn't last so long. I actually shed a little tear that engineering of this calibre is increasingly rare these days in a world that's built by the lowest bidder.

Re:Let me say

[w0mprat]

Does every conversation on slashdot have to turn into a tirade about how stupid and frustrating and awful and shoddy and worthless and disappointing and shitty and aggravating and horrible windows is? We know already! It's also despicable and unreliable and saddening and ugly and untrustworthy and pernicious and inadequate and etc etc etc...

Take your blinkers off. It's not just Windows.

Yes he's obviously missed Apple and Gnome bashing amongst other things.

Re:Let me say

[umghhh]

I think that is incorrect - what happened is that robust albeit imperfect product functioned also after a major design flaw came into light. That is not the same as an average software piece which crashes and leaves the user with the only option to reboot the bloody thing with usually no way to continue the work as it were. There is a difference and that is what the GP was getting at.

Re:Let me say

[w0mprat]

Universities weren't degree factories.

An individual could under stand a software program in it's entirety and perhaps even an entire computer system. Try that with 300 mlilion lines of code in a Linux distribution (A small one).

(Just to be more blunt about a couple of your points)

Re:Let me say

[Clsid]

"He who controls the spice, controls the universe!"

-Baron Vladimir Harkonnen

Re:Let me say

[Clsid]

About as well as the 386s and 486s they use in spaceships. They don't expose the electronics you know.

Re:Let me say

[Yvanhoe]

It was also possible to put a few kilograms of plutonium inside without sparking protests all over the country.

Just sayin...

Re:Let me say

[Intrepid imaginaut]

It's hard to lay the blame on manufacturers when people flock to the newest upgrade.

But people often flock to the latest and greatest because of sophisticated marketing campaigns, operated by these same manufacturers.

Re:Let me say

[popo]

... no the truly modern version would require a $2.99 iOS app to get the transmissions. "Free" is so last year.

Re:Let me say

[PyroMosh]

According to the CPI rate calculator here, that's about $700 today. Not $1000, but still quite comparable.

I don't know that I agree with MobileTatsu-NJG, but they make an excellent point. We collectively value cheap electronics and other goods. There is a race to the bottom and the more expensive products are having trouble competing.

Re:Let me say

[sjames]

It all comes down to money. If you outsource your development to the lowest bidder and even try to beat a few more pennies out of their offer, you'll get a steaming pile. If you keep screaming "more coding faster!", you'll get a big steaming pile. Chase your best and brightest away with poor management and crazy bureaucratic proceduralism and you'll be lucky if the code is decentish.

If you willingly spend $100/line of code and ASK when it will be done rather than TELLING when it will be done, it'll be near bulletproof.

Re:Let me say

[osu-neko]

Wow. What remarkable conciseness. So much wrong in one small paragraph, it'd take a book to explain it all...

Re:Let me say

[sznupi]

In my times, the cats didn't domesticate humans yet - so we had to scavenge whiskers in the dens/etc. of the beats, with great risk to life... and many sacrifices.

Re:Let me say

[sznupi]

On one hand I'd say: furthermore, we don't need the return of myths like "bomber gap", "missile gap" or "mineshaft gap"; or the literary fiction of Team B (but check the names on this one). But on the other... masses of people are still very good with self-terrorising. Which still assures spending, lots of it (and hence the problems with solvency)

Re:Let me say

[Anonymous Coward]

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/faq.html

There are three different computer types on the Voyager spacecraft and there are two of each kind. Total number of words among the six computers is about 32K.

Computer Command System (CCS) - 18-bit word, interrupt type processors (2) with 4096 words each of plated wire, non-volatile memory.

Flight Data System (FDS) - 16-bit word machine (2) with modular memories and 8198 words each

Attitude and Articulation Control System (AACS) - 18-bit word machines (2) with 4096 words each.

According to my calulations, that's a total of about 68KB, or small potatoes compared to today's microprocessors. We probably could perform all functions with one of today's boards and still have room for solid state data storage and much more fault detection software. We would still need a second unit for redundancy. Today's microprocessors are also much faster than the chips used on Voyager and a comparative system would use less electrical power. On the other hand, software might be more complicated as opposed to that used in an interrupt type system, but it would be much more capable and more flexible.

Let's look closer at the CCS. The CCS has two main functions: to carry out instructions from the ground to operate the spacecraft, and to be alert for a problem or malfunction and respond to it. Two identical 4096- word memories contain both fixed routines (about 2800 words) and a variable section (about 1290 words) for changing science sequences. The CCS issues commands to the AACS for movement of the scan platform or spacecraft maneuvers; to the FDS for changes in instrument configurations or telemetry rates and to numerous other subsystems within the spacecraft for specific actions. Fault-protection algorithms are also stored in the CCS, occupying roughly 10 percent of the CCS memory.

The main functions of the FDS are to collect data from, and controls the operations of, the scientific instruments; and to format engineering and science data for on-board storage and/or real-time transmission. The FDS also keeps the spacecraft "time" and provides frequency references to the instruments and other spacecraft subsystems.

The Voyager spacecraft computers are interrupt driven computer, similar to processors used in general purpose computers with a few special instructions for increased efficiency. The programming is a form of assembly language.

There is no clock chip, as such, in the spacecraft. The "clock" is really a counter, based on one of several electronically generated frequencies. These frequencies, based on a reference, generated by a very stable oscillator, are converted and fed to different locations in the spacecraft as synchronization signals, timers, counters, etc. The "clock" signal is part of the information telemetered to the ground and it is with ground software that we convert to day of year, time of day Greenwich Mean Time.

Voyager was built in-house at JPL; the computers were manufactured by General Electric to JPL specifications.

Re:Let me say

[Anonymous Coward]

In case you didn't know voyager 2 already does have a twitter account which is updated regularly.

Re:Let me say

[sznupi]

With millions of deaths in the process, and numerous times on the brink of very hot war, yay (at least initially hot, because afterwards we'd possibly get nuclear winter)

But just wait for swarms of easily mass-produced small autonomous vehicles (which would be my guess for the next nightmare in the style of Western Front of WW1, with tactics and mentality of the past and tech of the "future"; maybe throw in a bit of Skynet ;) )

Re:Let me say

[Bad Ad]

Umm, I think you missed what he said. He said "If a company would guarantee that a DVD (or even Blu Ray) player would last 20 years, what's the maximum you would pay?"

Not "how much would you pay for a 20 year old DVD player"

Re:Let me say

[wall0159]

"Who deserves more credit?"
Why does everything have to be a competition? Can't we accept that both groups have done a great job?

Re:Let me say

[tom17]

Just imagine the progress we'd be making now with todays tools and yesterdays mindset....

Re:Let me say

[JamesP]

Actually what they had was:

A slow processor with a shameful amount of memory

Programming for this requires a totally different mindset than today's programmers.

Most of the 'heavy lifting' is hardware based.

Re:Let me say

[turgid]

Of course they still work, both of those devices are infinitely simpler than a DVD player.

I'll bet that the DVD player has significantly fewer moving parts than the old gear from the 70s, and those that it has are not designed to last much longer than the warranty.

A DVD or Blu Ray player that lasts 20+ years is irrelevant since those formats are already obsolete by the time they come out. Technology has changed to the point that all of these media can be copied trivially and stored "on the network."

I don't need a CD or DVD player, as such, any more. All of the content can be ripped with no loss of quality and the physical media put away in the cupboard.

Re:Let me say

[dkh2]

"Who deserves more credit?"
Why does everything have to be a competition? Can't we accept that both groups have done a great job?

I bet you're one of those nimrods that doesn't keep score at a little league game.

Re:Let me say

[Confusador]

Speaking of which: http://twitter.com/#!/Voyager2

Re:Let me say

[Dracophile]

[8. vgerunits] Voyager2 says, OMFGLAG

Re:Let me say

[Thiez]

> Like using -1 instead of 1 as "true". Thereby having all 1's set instead of a single bit which, in theory, could change.

When bits start changing, reliability goes right out of the window. Sure there is a rather unlikely chance that some boolean value in RAM gets hit by a cosmic ray, and in your scheme this would result in an invalid value always, rather than an invalid value most of the time, while sometimes flipping the boolean value from true to false or back. Of course once we deem it likely that booleans can spontaneously change, testing for them "if (invalid(someboolean))" becomes completely pointless, because the testing itself introduces a boolean value, which we just established is unreliable.
Besides, perhaps they like to but multiple boolean values in a single word, which works if it's encoded as a single bit, and not so much as when it's encoded as "all 1s".
This is all assuming only boolean values get changed. Once you start flipping bits in loop counters, stack pointers, instruction pointers, you're fucked.

Your plan sounds interesting at first but I'm afraid it would prevent very few (if any) bugs, and modifying a compiler to use -1 for true rather than 1 may well introduce *more* bugs (especially when interacting with other code that may or may not have been written in c++).

Re:Let me say

[Professor_UNIX]

I have a VCR I bought in 1992 hooked up to a TV I bought in 1990 and they both still work just fine. I don't see why a DVD player shouldn't be able to last 20 years.

Re:Let me say

[ae1294]

And slide rules! Don't forget the slide rules.

I won't. I was sitting in the coffee shop, figuring some stuff out with one just the other day.

He's a WITCH! Burn the WITCH!

Re:Let me say

[Will.Woodhull]

If a company would guarantee that a DVD (or even Blu Ray) player would last 20 years, what's the maximum you would pay?

I would not pay very much for it. The thing would be obsolete for 15+ years of its projected service life.

Now I would consider paying a bit more for a DVD player that could be repurposed into something more useful than a paperweight when I have moved to the next thing in media storage. You got any thoughts about that?

Re:Let me say

[dave420]

The original engineers did create something awesome, but since then it's practically died a thousand times, and the only reason it's able to keep working are the advances in technology at the base station, which is able to correct for the errors the probe is generating. It's not as if the machine is working just as it did the first day it was in space, it's not. All this teary-eyed nostalgia is abject bullshit. The engineers back in the day created a hardened, relatively-simple machine, and shot it into space. Since then it's been falling apart. And somehow this is a testament to the skill of the old engineers, and a damning indictment of the modern-day engineers (who managed to keep it alive for so long). Old codger logic scares me.

Re:Let me say

[arth1]

Used it as a lookup table for tip, eh?

I like that mine works in all kinds of weather, whether it's in seaspray and rain, forty below snow storms or scorching hot sandstorms.

Re:Let me say

[joost]

You mean this Twitter account?

http://twitter.com/#!/Voyager2

Re:Let me say

[scharkalvin]

The transmitters in both Voyagers uses an RCA UHF 'pencil' vacuum tube. Amazing that these tubes have outlasted many solid state devices now used for the same purpose. Also the company than made them no longer exists as a technology giant.

Re:Let me say

[smelch]

Not to mention most software ends up running on all kinds of different hardware, a lot of which did not even exist at the time of writing the software and therefore could not be tested on.

Re:Let me say

[Kielistic]

You would not see little repair shops for today's technology because repairing it requires SMT machines. There are many reasons for the state of consumer goods today.

Planned obsolescence is only one of them and is not always true. There are definitely many times it is true. Such as Apple not putting a camera on the original ipad. Or Microsoft not including multiple taskbars in Windows 7. But not being able to fix/keep your DVD player working for 20 years has more to do with people wanting a $15 player and and a super HD one in 2 years than an evil company.

Re:Let me say

[smelch]

But now we've got radiation in interstellar space! Don't you see we're fucked?!

Re:Let me say

[Kielistic]

A PC. You could probably even install the next thing into it.

Re:Let me say

[wcrowe]

Take your blinkers off.

Blinkers?

Re:Let me say

[smelch]

For some reason I really like your typoed version of that sentence. It sounds like the kind of romantic comedy I would like to see complete with terror, bomb shelters and communists.

Re:Let me say

[arth1]

Today a manufacturer will put out shoddy rubbish to save $2 a unit. Most customers would pay an extra $2 for something that worked properly and lasted so blaming the consumer is just ridiculous misdirection

You overlook two things:
1: $2 saved by the manufacturer doesn't equate to $2 saved by the consumer. By the time the device gets to the consumer, it's likely 4-5 times the manufacturing costs, so that $2 saving is now $8-10.
2: You assume that it only happens for a single component. It doesn't, of course. It happens for all components, whether it's saving a penny or a dollar. If a company pinches a penny here and there, it all adds up when you do it to dozens or hundreds of components. So when summing up all the savings, they might not have saved $2, but $20.
Which, by the point it hits the consumer is likely $80-$100 difference.

Do you think the Wal-Mart shopping masses care more about a $80-100 price difference, or the quality which they're not qualified to judge?

No, the consumers pick crap. Almost every time. And signal that price is king, while quality isn't. The companies that make products get the message, loud and clear. It's called "consumerism", and is fairly well understood.

Re:Let me say

[T.E.D.]

Frankly, I think most people are like that. Few people really want to spend 80% of their waking life making crap. We all want to be able to take pride in how we spend our professional lives. Its the customers that don't want to pay for the Right Thing, because it is way more expensive. That goes for car mechanics as well as engineers. My auto mechanic (a good honest guy) is always telling me how he can fix that pesky oil leak in my car with about $400-$800 of labor and parts, or he can patch it cheap so it slows a bit. He knows I'm probably going to opt for the latter, because my car is old and it will be a damn long time before I leak out $400 of oil. But he gives me the "fix it right" option because he prefers to fix things right. That's what he gets up in the morning for.

I'm the same way with my software, as is any other programmer worth their salt IMHO. But I know damn well that if I give my boss an expensive Right Thing option and a cheap hack option on a bug in some old software, he'll prefer the cheap hack. If he's planning on ditching it before the hack is likely to become a big problem, that's probably financially the right option for him.

Re:Let me say

[khallow]

Back then, anything was possible, even expensive research unlikely to have any direct benifits.

Since when has that ever been the case? Even now, most research is intended to have long term gains not boost the next quarter. But those long term gains aren't centuries in the future long term gains. Never was, never will be. Unless, of course, humanity gets a good boost in longevity. In which case, you might start seeing projects with payouts in the centuries range.

Re:Let me say

[smelch]

I greatly enjoy working with very small clock rates and amounts of memory. You don't have a bunch of layers of abstraction that require you to use more memory and more clock cycles to account for the fact that this software may be running on any hardware. It gets right down to the core of the problem where you are solving a logical puzzle instead of trying to figure out what the commands of a certain library do on abstract hardware.

Re:Let me say

[flappinbooger]

I didn't reveal my personal opinion above, just posed the question. I think that good design is nothing without good maintenance and support, and vice versa.

I don't know about "old codger logic" but I think the engineers from the 60's did some great things, (just like engineers in the 70's and 80's and 90's and 00's and....) but the engineers from the mid 20'th century are always quick to say "Yeah, yeah, but we did things WITH SLIDE RULES..." and that's really the only feather in their cap. (Oh, and they went to the moon and invented the nuclear bomb and a few other trinkets)

Engineers from today, what have they done? Pfft.. Handheld supercomputers (comparatively) and instant global communications for "free" and ubiquitous access to global knowledge and information at the drop of a hat. Pish Posh. Most engineers today don't even know how to use a slide rule. Bah.

Personally I wish the old-school new-school pissing matches would stop, I think both generations could learn from each other. In college I had profs who had us to EVERYTHING on computer using the computer algebra software Mathematica on our NeXT workstations. Other profs made us do everything by hand using pencil on engineering paper, so far as to have us do Laplace transforms BY HAND (don't trust the sshhhoftwaaare). At any rate it made us appreciate modern technology and we moved on.

Re:Let me say

[smelch]

Um... wtf.... they use 386s and 486s in spaceships because as you increase the clock speed and you decrease power consumption the more likely it is that your bits will get cancer from space. We should X-Ray a bunch of computers running pong from 1970 - 2011 and see which ones perform the best. X-Ray might not be enough, we could do CT scans or something though... I'd like to see that.

Re:Let me say

[JamesP]

My thoughts exactly! I enjoy it a lot as well.

It's just the problem at hand, and flipping bits.

You really have to rethink everything when you have 256 bytes of memory (or less) and a stripped down C compiler/libs (or not even that)

Re:Let me say

[Grizzley9]

It's hard to lay the blame on manufacturers when people flock to the newest upgrade.

But people often flock to the latest and greatest because of sophisticated marketing campaigns, operated by these same manufacturers.

Sophisticated? I must be woefully ignorant after my marketing classes or someone is giving them too much credit.

Re:Let me say

[tyrione]

Software Engineers--that's an oxymoron right there. Back then they were computer programmers/software programmers. Computer Science is not an Engineering Field. We aren't breaking down Stefan Boltman's constant wrt to Fins for Passive Heat Transfer like a Mechanical Engineer who treats the Programming as it should be--as a tool, not as this title of Engineer. I rarely worked with anyone at NeXT or Apple that were actually Software Engineers. They were Ph.Ds in Physics, Mathematics, Engineering, etc., but because the Industry decided to create this title, ``Software Engineer'' about the same time they came up with ``Architect'' they too had the title of Software Engineer. Of course, they had the credentials of Engineer more often than not. Today's software reminds me an awful lot of like today's average home construction--substandard, never-to-code and cheaply assembled.

Re:Let me say

[tyrione]

Congratulations to the engineers working on the original project all those years ago.

I had the pleasure of meeting Dr. Ed Stone at a recent NASA event, one of those chief engineers, if only briefly. It really is stunning to think of these most-distant man-made objects and what it must be like where they are.

When I asked him how he felt knowing that something he worked on was so far away, his answer was quite short and honest in a humble engineering sort of way: "pretty fantastic"! So absolutely fantastic, indeed!

Whence has the spirit of exploration gone, and how can we keep it strong?

Oh, and when was the last time it needed a reboot?

-6d

Until we start electing individuals with broader scientific backgrounds to serve in Congress we'll continue to have morons catering to morons.

Re:Let me say

[Mr. Underbridge]

If you willingly spend $100/line of code and ASK when it will be done rather than TELLING when it will be done, it'll be near bulletproof.

So how is morale on the Duke Nukem dev team, anyway?

Re:Let me say

[Vampo]

Well, since you brought it up...

"The Universe operates on a basic principle of economics: everything has its cost. We pay to create our future, we pay for the mistakes of the past. We pay for every change we make and we pay just as dearly if we refuse to change."

-Guild Bank Annals, Philosophical Register

Re:Let me say

[Coren22]

Change the question some, and the answer would be yes. I would pay twice as much for a washer or dryer that would last 20 years, unfortunately, they are built to last 5 years if you are lucky, they actually have a component called a spider in washers that is designed to break.

Re:Let me say

[smelch]

In high school I took an engineering course for 3 hours a day my junior and senior year. For my senior project I was using a BASIC Stamp to make a remote controlled cooler. Nothing is as cool as writing a program that interfaces directly with hardware to read a universal remote's signal, convert that in to a direction (rotate left, rotate right or forward), and be able to record and traverse up to four paths backward and forward in 16kB. When you only have a very limited amount of memory you start thinking about things like how many steps the path can have, what that means for the maximum duration of each step, if we make variable lengths for specific data elements does that get us more or less effective information, and in which cases? If I store the data in one way that is a little bit bigger, but it saves me 64 bytes of memory from program complexity is it worth it? Those are the problems I like thinking about instead of the best way to write code for a balance of reuse, stability, maintainability and portability.

Re:Let me say

[An Anonymous Coward]

If you could sell me a 20 year old DVD player I would buy it in an instant for $1000 especially since the first DVD player was introduced in 1997. Hell I would demand all of Phillips income for the past 14 years.

DVD was launched in 1997.

Ok... but that's not the question he was asking. He said would you pay $1000 for a DVD player that was guaranteed to last 20 years from NOW, not would you buy a 20 year OLD DVD player that still worked. And the answer any sane person would give is "no" simply because in 20 years, DVD isn't likely to be relevant anymore. By then, everyone will have moved on to Bluray++.

The point (I believe) he's trying to make is that there's a trade-off between durable technology and price. If people were willing to pay massive amounts of money for technology that lasted 20 years, companies would be making them. But since people count on technology being obsolete after relatively short periods of time, they'd rather pay $100 for a player that will last 5 years that can be tossed out when upgrades come along or cheaply replaced if they should break.

When you're building something designed to go as far into space as it can before breaking down, cheap, fragile technology just isn't an option. A lot of money was put into making sure Voyager would be as durable as possible, because when it breaks down, there's no going out there to replace it.

Re:Let me say

[khallow]

Let's look at the assertions:

- false. The university system was always designed to maximize profits.

While I have to disagree with the assertion that universities "maximize profit" (they didn't do it then, they don't do it now), I see the rest of the post as mostly correct.

What they did not have was government giving loans left right and center, thus increasing the demand in nominal terms, while destroying the currency and forcing tuition fees up

Why charge $8,000 per year for an education when you can charge $30,000 per year and get the same demand? That's the situation with current education loans. They're just inflating the cost of college. The only reason educators aren't among the richest people in the world is because the vast majority of schools are squandering this money as fast as they get it (ie, the fact that they use the money to pump up the bureaucracy, construct buildings, etc rather than maximizing profit).

The vast supply of bad loans which would make no sense without the protections against default that the federal government has put in, isn't going to help the US stabilize the US dollar. It creates a lot of money (resulting in the above mentioned education inflation) and provides further incentives to inflate the US dollar. After all, the US is creating a generation of US voters with large debt and onerous repayment conditions, that group will end up supporting any inflationary policy in order to get out from under.

while simultaneously driving savings and thus the investment capital out to other places, that wanted that capital more and weren't punishing people for success in business.

And the US government is notorious for distorting capital markets. For example, in this case, they have two such direct ways which I've already mentioned: dumping vast amounts of money in universities for the same product the universities offered for far less in the 60s and impoverishing a generation of students. We also need to consider that a number of the lenders would have lent elsewhere, if the student loan market weren't so easy. That means less capital for everything else that requires capital. Your employer might be able to borrow money at lower rates, if it weren't for your children's plump educational loans. And we need to consider that the US government subsidizes a lot of these loans meaning that yet more capital is lost via increased taxes or increased federal debt. That's four ways right there.

The only driving force behind innovation is need that comes out of the market and causes manufacturers to compete.

I'd call this want since the division between a want and need is a matter of subjective opinion. Otherwise correct. I consider innovation the entire pipeline from idea to monetized product which is probably similar to what the original poster intended. It is inherently a capitalist idea. But if your definition differs (say, zapping things in labs is good enough) then results will fall short.

When you have government money simultaneously increase the demand while shifting supply elsewhere, expect that other place to increase innovation and wealth, while your place only to increase consumption and debt.

Eh, that could be said better and in more detail. I see several possible interpretations. For example, as I see it, the value of US education from kindergarten through college is going down while the subsidies and the cost go up. I see that as eventually chasing education to other countries that don't have this problem. Alternately, he could be referring to how spending on educational subsidies worsen the issue of massive debt to foreign governments (such as China, the EU members, and Japan), providing competitive advantage to these countries in global trade.

When a government misallocates wealth on a large scale, such as with educational loan subsidies, someone usually benefits even as society suffers.

Re:Let me say

[Coren22]

All the Blu-ray players I have seen have automatic sleep settings, they tend to go to sleep after 5 minutes or so on the menu screen, and if you pause it for more then 5 minutes or so, it will go to sleep as well. They also seem to auto-resume as a feature from where you were last, even if it isn't the last movie you played (watch half of movie A, watch movie B, put disk A back in, and it will resume).

Re:Let me say

[Coren22]

I had a crash the other day, but yes, I agree, it is rare.

Re:Let me say

[Risen888]

If you don't think those 1970s Pioneer turntables are absolute monuments to quality engineering, you've never seen one. As for "infinitely simpler," the mechanical parts perform pretty much exactly the same function. There's a motor that spins the disc, the disc is read by either a stylus or a laser. It's typically the motors that go first on DVD players, at least in my experience. To contrast, the motor that powers my Pioneer turntable (IANTOP) is purring along forty years later.

So yeah, they're comparable. The DVD players just don't compare very well.

Re:Let me say

[PPH]

Used it as a lookup table for tip, eh?

Yep. They really like me at that coffee shop. 15% of $4.50 comes up as $6.75.

Re:Let me say

[g0bshiTe]

Not really considering I just recently purchased a DVD player to replace my 10 year old Pioneer. Considering that the new one was sub $50, if I get 5 years out of it before purchasing another, I'm still well under that $1000 mark you suggest for one that lasts 20 years.

Re:Let me say

[FredFredrickson]

..in spice.

Re:Let me say

[torgis]

>

Speak for yourself.

Some of us take pride in our work and write fast, reliable software that runs on servers for multiple years without interference.

Agreed. Although I find this is much easier to do when working alone. Nothing has the potential to wreck finely written code like a bunch of half-competent developers mucking about in it.

Re:Let me say

[the_hellspawn]

DVD player...$200.00 tops and that's it. The damn thing will be old as most technology matures. Now a washer, drier, car, stove, microwave, and so forth I would pay a higher premium for that guarantee the thing will not break for 20 years.

Re:Let me say

[Golddess]

How much would you actually pay to get a 20-year DVD player?

I don't know how to answer that question because I don't know what the average life expectancy of a DVD player is.

But I have an original NES that still works, and power surges not-withstanding, I expect to continue to work. There may be other expected reasons for it to fail that I cannot think of at this time, but my point is that unless I am aware of the fact that a device contains parts that are expected to wear out with use, and how long those parts are expected to last for, I would expect that device to essentially last forever.

Re:Let me say

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

DVD players, unlike NES's, have moving parts. (Note: With the exception being the carriage for the NES cartridge... that'll likely be the bit that fails on you.) Eventually the rubber belts inside if your DVD player will degrade, snap, and it won't spin the disc. You won't take it to a repair shop (I'd bet you don't even know where there's one that's handy, I can tell you I don't anymore...) , you are likely to either buy a $30 replacement or go to a low-to-mid-range Blu Ray player. I highly doubt, and I do apologize if I'm wrong, that you purchased your DVD player expecting to even continue using it after say 5 years.

Re:Let me say

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

You just very neatly supported my point, thank you.

Re:Let me say

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

What did you pay for that turntable?

Re:Let me say

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

The belts will go bad or the ribbon cable that connects the laser assembly to the board will break after moving back and forth so many times.

Re:Let me say

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

A DVD or Blu Ray player that lasts 20+ years is irrelevant since those formats are already obsolete by the time they come out. Technology has changed to the point that all of these media can be copied trivially and stored "on the network."

Thank you, that's exactly my point.

Re:Let me say

[Risen888]

Got it as a gift from my (ex-)girlfriend's father, who had used it extensively in his home for 30+ years. Thing's older than me by damn near a decade. Still had the manual, schematics, and a spare stylus. Couldn't tell you what it cost new, sorry.

Re:Let me say

[bgat]

According to my calulations, that's a total of about 68KB, or small potatoes compared to today's microprocessors. We probably could perform all functions with one of today's boards and still have room for solid state data storage and much more fault detection software.

In fact, some of the lowest-end embedded processors have more than 68KB of *cache* memory alone. There are $5 parts available that can, at least electrically, perform all that would be needed of a Voyager computer in a single chip.

But the teeny tiny process geometries of today's hardware wouldn't survive such a 30+-year deployment, even if it wasn't in deep space.

Re:Let me say

[tacokill]

....and that woman was Ann Druryan. You might know her as the widow of one Carl Sagan.

Re:Let me say

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

I found a vintage ad that places it at around $120. That's roughly $650 when adjusted for inflation.

Re:Let me say

[Tablizer]

Fuck the modern era. We did more with slide rules and determination than we do now with modern technology.

"And get off my interstellar lawn!"

Re:Let me say

[Risen888]

I wouldn't be surprised a bit. It's high-end kit. Of course, I've done more damage to the poor thing in four years than he did in thirty :(

OTOH, my current girlfriend has one of those fairly cheapo all-in-one turntable/dual deck/tuner kind of deals, probably from the early 80s, probably the whole thing didn't cost as much as my turntable did when they were both new. The original speakers finally died a couple years back, and we had to stick a shim up in the stylus arm to keep it from "falling in" to the plastic housing, but the motor's still going strong.

One differentiator that I did think of in the course of this discussion though, is that obviously turntable motors don't have to run anywhere near as many RPMs as DVD player motors. Also, turntables are bigger and have a lot more room for heat dispersion. I have no data on this, but I would wager that overheating is a major factor on failure rates of modern electronics.

Re:Let me say

[nbauman]

They also loved in an age where beating the Soviets in science and technology was considered more important than building the next iDink consumer device, or concocting some alchemical algorithm for market traders.

The Soviets were the best rivals we ever had.

None of this bullshit about teachers getting paid too much, we have to break their union, fire them, privatize the education system, make college kids mortgage their future with loans, bring in H-1Bs if we need scientists and engineers, and teach creationism.

We were putting money into science and engineering education like we're putting money today into the war on terrorism.

Scientists had respect.

We had to beat the commies into space, after they humiliated us http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sputnik_1 twice http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Yuri_Gagarin If they hadn't purged Korolev http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sergei_Korolev they might have put the first man on the moon.

And they were great mathematicians too.

And they made great symphonies and movies.

Re:Let me say

[nbauman]

You know, they weren't club-wielding savages in loincloths back then.

Don't knock it, son. Those club-wielding savages invented fire.

Re:Let me say

[nbauman]

Like I said:

Stone had a brilliant mind. In 1957, when he was a graduate student studying space physics at the University of Chicago, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik. "Just like that, because of the Cold War and our need to match Sputnik," he says, "a whole new realm absolutely opened up."
http://www.latimes.com/news/local/la-me-0414-ed-stone-20110412,0,2806518,full.story

Re:Let me say

[Mogusha]

Having multiple booleans in a single word definitely makes sense to keep the true == 1 convension. I suspect, however, that in a case like the voyager probe they would likely have had multiple copies of the same memory to prevent radiation problems.

However, as Dog-Cow pointed out, true is defined as !false, which means that any value, including -1, would be classified as true. So, in at least the cases where one were trying to go for software that could counteract possible hardware problems of that likeness it would be a safer idea to go with -1 instead of 1.

Re:Let me say

[khallow]

The entire premise that there are so many student loans that it is distorting the national economy is on it's face silly.

That premise wasn't advanced. And student loans are $826 billion as of 2010. That's a bit more respectable. And it seems rather large given that it is concentrated among graduates and dropouts rather than the general population.

Re:Let me say

[toddestan]

It's still a cost saving measure. There's no reason they have to use a belt or a ribbon cable with soldered ends. It's just those are the cheapest options.

Besides, my DVD player (the only one I've ever purchased) is now 10 years old. Heck, my 5 CD changer is 12 years old. Both still work. I fully intend to see how long they last.

Re:Let me say

[cthulhu11]

.. so long as you don't horque the high-gain antenna by shipping it back and forth across the country for no good reason

Re:Let me say

[sjames]

That's a hardware problem ;-)

Re:Let me say

[Phoghat]

I have a 16 year old Nissan minivan and bits and pieces have stopped working or have fallen off. It would be nice to have (even though impossible) a 30 year old car that still worked as well as the day it rolled off the line

Re:Let me say

[tzot]

> Although, there are a few things that could be done to improve some reliability, even in old c++. Although I'm sure there might be difficulties with platforms other than x86. Like using -1 instead of 1 as "true". Thereby having all 1's set instead of a single bit which, in theory, could change.

Consequently using 0 as "false". Thereby having all bits reset when a single bit, in theory, could change.
Where's the reliability in that?

That's why you use triple identical systems and select as result the majority's vote.

Re:Let me say

[RockDoctor]

You had a keyboard? We didn't have one, we just tapped the two wires together in morse code to control the keypuncher monkey thing..

I once had a keyboard rained on while in the middle of the forest with no chance to get a replacement for a while. I took it apart and figured out the shorts I had to make in the controlling circuit board to enter the password with a paperclip...

... and you enjoyed the experience so much that you've not used a keyboard since.

Yeah, right.

(Dot matrix printer with a 9-pin head ; the cable developed a nick that propagated. For printing morning reports, I could get by with 6 pins, but for printing diagrams I needed to patch the cable back together to get at least 7 pins working. EVERY morning for a week until the shops opened again and I could get a new printer, this being over Christmas and a weekend.)

Re:Let me say

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

It's very much a fun-once-or-twice kind of thing. :)

Re:Let me say

[rmstar]

The only driving force behind innovation is need that comes out of the market and causes manufacturers to compete.

I'd call this want since the division between a want and need is a
matter of subjective opinion. Otherwise correct.

Right, because compassion, vision, inspiration, etc. amount to nothing. You guys are so severely impoverished on a spiritual level, it is incredible. How utterly horrible. And you are wrong too, btw.

Re:Let me say

[datapharmer]

If you think what you wrote is true, don't go into engineering. Ever. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Radiation_hardening#Problems_caused_by_radiation

Re:Let me say

[sznupi]

Also chess and hockey (here's hoping for crossover). Electronic music, Tetris, RAR, Chatroulette (well, last two not so Soviet)

Though I'm not quite sure how them putting the first satellite and man into space (or first photograph of far side of the Moon, first lunar flyby, first spacecraft reaching the escape velocity of the Earth & on circumsolar orbit; first lunar impact, soft landing + photos from the surface some time later; first flyby of another planet and atmospheric probes; and those are just launched by R-7) leaves much for "We had to beat the commies into space" ;p

(maybe even somewhat more focused; to bad either cash strapped, (also) forced into crazed crash projects, or worse / both ; but BTW, check out Atlas V and Taurus II main engines, and first stage of the latter ;p )

PS. But IMHO you still see the past through rose-coloured glasses, a bit...

Re:Let me say

[sznupi]

...the universities offered for far less in the 60s...

How can one even say that seriously? (I guess you also feel nostalgic for "myth of past middle-class glory"?)

"Inherently capitalist" is also drive to use the advantage given by... capital. By itself.

Re:Let me say

[sznupi]

Sir, are you or have you ever been a member of the communist party?

(but seriously...)

Beautiful

[Anonymous Coward]

And with a vacuum tube final stage RF amplifier too.

Re:Beautiful

[olsmeister]

Funny you would use a vacuum tube in ... a nearly perfect vacuum....

Re:Beautiful

[FlyingGuy]

Best part is that if the tube cracks because of some thermal stress from years of heat cycles... Still in a vacuum! bonus

Re:Beautiful

[Brett Buck]

Hate to break this to you, but almost all high-power RF transmitters at these sorts of frequencies use vacuum tubes, space or otherwise.

I know

[deodiaus2]

I saw it on Star Trek, TMP!

Re:I know

[syousef]

I saw it on Star Trek, TMP!

...and as long as it stays on Star Trek and doesn't move to "Voyager: Excrement my dad says", it'll be just fine!

Re:Just wait

[txoof]

I for one look forward to meeting our new Whale Loving overlords.

won't fly forever

[melikamp]

I bet Voyagers won't fly forever. When space travel become cheap and safe enough, they will be seen as collectible items, and will be recovered. The two golden records will probably become the most expensive records money can buy.

Re:won't fly forever

[SJHillman]

Only if the RIAA claims they own the copyright to them... and we know they will

Re:won't fly forever

[iluvcapra]

Several of the compositions on the record are protected by master rights and were licensed specifically for the record, which is why you can't buy a CD of the Voyager Golden Record -- the recordings aren't licensed for sale.

RIAA doesn't own the copyright to any music.

Re:won't fly forever

[The_REAL_DZA]

RIAA doesn't own the copyright to any music.

Just the souls of many unfortunate artists.

Re:won't fly forever

[Daniel Dvorkin]

When space travel become cheap and safe enough, they will be seen as collectible items, and will be recovered.

I kind of have my doubts that it's ever going to be cheap to get out to where they are. Even if we reach the point (and I sincerely hope we do) where we're zipping around the inner planets the way we currently fly around the world, catching up with the Voyagers would be on a whole different order of difficulty. And the longer it takes us to to develop the technology, the farther away they get ...

Re:won't fly forever

[michelcolman]

I bet the RIAA is looking forward to the day aliens find the probes and start illegally copying the sound track.

Re:won't fly forever

[w0mprat]

Actually.. the longer it takes to develop the technology the cheaper the price/performance ratio and the less expenditure required. That's just how technology does it's thing. Getting stuff to orbit becomes ever cheaper and it becomes ever more efficient space propulsion with higher specific impulse, means it'll eventually be affordable to go hunting artefacts of early space exploration.

Means eventually the Voyagers will be stumbled upon by the interstellar equivalent of a Tuk Tuk and sold on the black market in some Kupier belt slum.

Re:won't fly forever

[popo]

Space travel cheap and safe enough? Lulz. The fires of optimism manage to burn bright against scientific reality.

Re:won't fly forever

[ArmchairGeneral]

Well if aliens do indeed find the disc and come to Earth with it, I hope their first greeting from us isn't a subpoena.

Re:won't fly forever

[Xyrus]

Only if we develop space travel before DJ K'Hul Kra'znk uses them in his ultra retro intergalactic remix of Gettin' Ze'nkay With It.

Re:won't fly forever

[Iskender]

You live in a scientific reality where today's knowledge can reliably predict future knowledge and capabilities?

Re:won't fly forever

[iluvcapra]

They used to sell it but they had to withdraw it -- you can still find it on torrent sites: "Whispers of Earth"

Re:won't fly forever

[bhiestand]

Actually.. the longer it takes to develop the technology the cheaper the price/performance ratio and the less expenditure required. That's just how technology does it's thing. Getting stuff to orbit becomes ever cheaper and it becomes ever more efficient space propulsion with higher specific impulse, means it'll eventually be affordable to go hunting artefacts of early space exploration.

  Means eventually the Voyagers will be stumbled upon by the interstellar equivalent of a Tuk Tuk and sold on the black market in some Kupier belt slum.

I think that's mistakenly equating technological advance with advances in energy cost and supply. Barring energy advancements we simply haven't seen yet (cheap cold fusion, etc.) I'm not so confident about this prediction.

This basically assumes that energy availability will continue to increase, based on some unspecified technological advancements, when we seem to be reaching plateaus or declines. We're exhausting many of our supplies and have failed to develop the new technology... we could simply collapse or decline.

Re:won't fly forever

[UtsuMaster]

I live in a scientific reality where the morons of today reliably repeat the morons throughout history.

And somehow I can't see the social context for this kind of significant technological progress.

It's less about knowledge and more about just... keeping it real.

not yet

[chowdahhead]

They have a long way to go until they leave the Kuiper Belt and really reach the edge of our solar system, but impressive none the less.

Re:not yet

[Jeremy Erwin]

You're probably thinking of the Oort Cloud.

From the wikipedia

In August 2009, Voyager 1 was over 16.5 terameters (16.5×1012 meters, or 16.5×109 km, 110.7 AU, or 10.2 billion miles) from the Sun, and thus had entered the heliosheath region between solar wind's termination shock and the heliopause (the limit of the solar wind). Beyond heliopause is the bow shock of the interstellar medium, beyond which is interstellar space, a vast area where the Sun's influence gives way to that of the Milky Way galaxy in general. At this distance, light from the Sun takes over 16 hours to reach the probe.

The Kuiper belt extends from 30 AU to 55 AU.

Re:not yet

[jd]

The end of the heliopause is sometimes considered the end of the solar system. Any Kuiper Belt or Oort Cloud objects further out are blasted by the galactic winds at that point, they experience nothing from the solar system bar gravity and even Alpha Centauri experiences that.

Re:not yet

[iluvcapra]

Every two years or so Voyager \d crosses the (heliosheath | heliopause | bow shock | edge of the cosmic wind | edge of the Oort cloud | ... ) and this arbitrary boundary is used as a pretext to run off a press release.

Re:not yet

[Goboxer]

That is really neat to think that even if we somehow had a ship that could travel the speed of light, it would still take us 16 hours to get to our furthest reaching probe. Neat, depressing, and impressive all at the same time.

Re:not yet

[Jeremy Erwin]

Project Daedalus envisions sending a probe to Banard's Star, about six light years away. The journey would take 50 years.

Re:not yet

[michelcolman]

It's a bit like those incessant stories about weather balloons taking pictures from outer space.

Re:not yet

[osu-neko]

Every two years or so Voyager \d crosses the (heliosheath | heliopause | bow shock | edge of the cosmic wind | edge of the Oort cloud | ... ) and this arbitrary boundary is used as a pretext to run off a press release.

Every few years, some new area of space is entered, new science is done, etc. You would prefer NASA not inform the public about what it does with their money? Really, they should have just kept all the pictures and data and stuff to themselves all along, who cares about Neptune and stuff anyhow...

Re:not yet

[iluvcapra]

They should reserve press releases for legitimate new discoveries, instead of arbitrary crossings of lines that humans drew decades ago. They should not waste our time with their attempt to get newspaper clippings to paste into their grant application.

Re:not yet

[UtsuMaster]

Would your otherwise "wasted" time directly provide NASA funding or lead to legitimate new discoveries?

I'm not trying to be adversarial, but even from a cynical point of view, things still look better than the alternatives.

Re:not yet

[CtownNighrider]

Its not arbitrary. Its the point at which forces from the interstellar medium are equal to those of the solar wind, since both of these change the heliopause moves around which is why they pass over it several times.

Re:Just wait

[md65536]

The real challenge will be dealing with the alien race of machines who interface with it and set out on a destructive journey toward Earth in order to contact its creator.

Nothing...

[Deliveranc3]

for a LONG LONG time.

Re:Nothing...

[jd]

I don't know about "nothing" - we have zero knowledge of the galactic winds. We can't even be sure that the probes won't hit a glass dome.

Re:Nothing...

[The_REAL_DZA]

We can't even be sure that the probes won't hit a glass dome.

Maybe they already did a long time ago and the "Voyager Anomaly" is just a floating-point-error in the Matrix...

Re:Nothing...

[michelcolman]

Hadn't that anomaly been solved fairly recently? Something to do with light reflecting differently from different surfaces, creating a slight push.

Re:Nothing...

[jd]

Ah, but those could be shards from the dome the stars are painted on. Those would reflect light differently. (C'mon, guys, with some effort we shoul be able to turn this into an international conspiracy theory!)

Re:Nothing...

[UtsuMaster]

Conspiracy nut guesswork really is something. Dome the stars are painted on? Really? That's absurd!

You assume the government did actually launch the probes. It's all a setup. Can't you tell between a real engineer and an actor?

What we should be asking is why is Hollywood behind it. Stick with the facts.

How long till

[Dyinobal]

Can anyone do the math as to how long it will take the probe to reach it's next solar system? I realize the amount of time will be insane and the probe will be most likely (read definitely) dead by then but still it's interesting.

Re:How long till

[Khoa]

If by "dead" you mean out of juice, then yes. If you think it'd become spacecraft spaghetti then no. The odds of it bumping into another celestial is slim to nil. Space is VAST!

Re:How long till

[FrootLoops]

Relevant Wikipedia text for Voyager 1, the farther and faster of the two (taken from here):

As of April 21, 2011, Voyager 1 was about 116.825 AU, or about 10,843,294,886 miles or about 0.00183 of a light-year from the Sun. [...] Voyager 1's current relative velocity to the sun is 17.061 km/s, or 61,452 kilometres per hour (38,185 mph). This calculates as 3.599 AU per year, about 10% faster than Voyager 2. At this velocity, 73,600 years would pass before reaching the nearest star, Proxima Centauri, were the spacecraft traveling in the direction of that star. [...]

Voyager 1 is not heading towards any particular star, but in about 40,000 years it will pass within 1.6 light years of the star AC+79 3888 in the constellation Camelopardalis. That star is generally moving towards our Solar System at about 119 kilometers per second.

You might want to take that with a grain of salt, though, since there's an incorrect calculation in part of the paragraph I didn't quote and 11 significant figures is very suspiciously precise in the miles figure. Also, the 73,600 figure doesn't agree with my own calculations in the hundreds place. But I imagine what I quoted is pretty close to the truth.

Re:How long till

[Dyinobal]

I've found that most people can't grasp how big space is. I can on a intellectual level but most people don't seem to understand just how distance even the closest stars are. I've met a few who thought a lightyear was the distance it took up to travel in a year in a modern space shuttle. But wow Voyager is going itno the black, I hope it doesn't turn into a Reaver.

Re:How long till

[PPH]

Forever is a pretty long time, If something is physically possible, eventually it will happen.

I know of several supermodels that will disagree.

Re:How long till

[jd]

It does, however, assume no significant transfer of momentum from the galactic winds to the probe, even over a 40,000 year period. I've a real hard time with that, but sadly I can't find any cryogenics facility with a 40,000 year warranty. Even then, posting the results on Slashdot might be difficult.

Re:How long till

[Waffle Iron]

Can anyone do the math as to how long it will take the probe to reach it's next solar system? I realize the amount of time will be insane and the probe will be most likely (read definitely) dead by then but still it's interesting.

At its current speed, it would take tens of thousands of years to get to the nearest star. But since it's not aimed at any particular star, it would probably take many millions of years before it actually enters another solar system by chance.

I assume that the probe will gradually be eroded away over millions of years by interstellar dust, gas and radiation. I've never seen an estimate of how long it will remain recognizable, though. I wonder if it will actually ever reach another star system while it still exists.

Re:How long till

[kelemvor4]

If you watch the video on the linked page, the narrator says it will be 40,000 years.

Re:How long till

[Jarik C-Bol]

article did the math for you. forty thousand years to be within 2 light years of another star system.

Re:How long till

[FrootLoops]

The source of the 40,000 figure is here, which is at least hosted on jpl.nasa.gov. I was hoping an author careful enough to include star movement was careful enough to include whatever other relevant effects may exist. You mentioned momentum transfer. Off the top of my head, there may also be electrostatic effects, gravitational fields, or a particle field drifting in some direction which may or may not modify the calculation significantly.

Re:How long till

[FrootLoops]

Yes, our smallness is astonishing. The relative difference in scale going from pencils to atoms is dwarfed by the relative difference in scale going from light-years to pencils. Very roughly, going from the size of a galaxy to the size of a person is comparable to going from the size of a person to the atomic scale twice. On the scale of galaxies, each person is an atom's atom.

Re:How long till

[bhagwad]

I wonder - 4 billion years later when (if?) our sun explodes, will it be far away enough to escape being destroyed? If so, it might be the only remnants of earth/humanity ever left.

Re:How long till

[MichaelSmith]

I wonder - 4 billion years later when (if?) our sun explodes, will it be far away enough to escape being destroyed? .

Sure. Its far enough away now.

Re:How long till

[DeathElk]

Wow, my mind just melted.

Re:How long till

[jrumney]

What is interesting about this, is that although Proxima Centauri is currently the nearest star, there are other stars that will be closer within the timeframe it would take to travel there. I'm not a astronomer, so I had no idea that the Milky Way was changing so quickly (40,000 years seems a short time to me on an interstellar scale).

Re:How long till

[fahrbot-bot]

I've found that most people can't grasp how big space is.

I've always found this to be helpful. From The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy:

The Universe -- some information to help you live in it.

1. AREA: Infinite.
   The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy offers this definition of the word "infinite".
   Infinite: Bigger than the biggest thing ever and then some. Much bigger than that in fact, really amazingly immense, a totally stunning size, real "wow, that's big," time. Infinity is just so big that, by comparison, bigness itself looks really titchy. Gigantic multiplied by colossal multiplied by staggeringly huge is the sort of concept we're trying to get across here.
2. IMPORTS: None.
   It is impossible to import things into an infinite area, there being no outside to import things in from.
3. EXPORTS: None.
   See Imports.

...

Re:How long till

[fahrbot-bot]

P.S. Before anyone bitches that the quote is from the book The Restaurant at the End of the Universe (which it is, chapter 19), that book is quoting The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy itself, not the book of the same name...and that was my reference. Just sayin'.

Re:How long till

[MichaelSmith]

Our sun isn't going to go supernova. It will just turn into a red giant.

Re:How long till

[Surt]

My cryogenics facility offers a 100,000 year warranty. Plenty of cushion to see if voyager will reach another star system or not.

Re:How long till

[Surt]

Our sun will definitely not explode, so don't stress. Voyager is safe.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sun#Life_cycle

Re:How long till

[michelcolman]

I imagine it will stay inside our galaxy, so the expansion of the universe (galaxies flying away from each other) is not really a factor here. Still, even inside our galaxy, stars are pretty far away from each other so it will take a long, long time before it ever happens to get near one. The probe is now 16 light hours away while the closest star outside our solar system, alpha centauri, is about 2000 times as far. That gives a pretty good idea of how much emptiness is out there. And even if it were going straight for alpha centauri, which it isn't, it would still take a very long time before it got there. 30 years times 2000?

Re:How long till

[osu-neko]

...11 significant figures is very suspiciously precise in the miles figure.

Not really. The precision by which we delivered these spacecraft to their respective flybys was breathtaking. At the time they did their planetary flybys, NASA could have told you, at a given point in time, how many yards it was between Voyager and the JPL lobby. To be able to tell you accurately to the nearest mile today is, well, bloody remarkable, but to be expected. The whole problem with the "Voyager Anomaly" (recently solved) was only known about because we know their positions so precisely, we can detect how a bit of stray operating heat has altered their course over the years.

Re:How long till

[FrootLoops]

In part I meant it was strange that the same figure was given in three different units with wildly different precision each time--that suggested someone might have rounded arbitrarily to the nearest mile after a conversion. I also wondered if mile-scale figures were even possible to measure, but the magnitude of the Pioneer anomaly is a very good point, and suggests that mile-scale measurements are possible. (I've never heard of a "Voyager anomaly". A brief search for the phrase only revealed a few forum posts by, well, idiots, and an apparent typo where "Pioneer anomaly" was meant.)

Re:How long till

[lxs]

Hah! The Shuttle can travel a light year in three weeks, according to CNN.

Re:How long till

[lxs]

Yeah but think how impressive your 4 digit UID will be by that time.

Re:How long till

[Combatso]

Just ask Kirk when he comes back to get a whale.

Re:How long till

[JTsyo]

Does it have the mass needed to enter a solar system? Would it just get pushed aside by the stellar wind?

Re:How long till

[FredFredrickson]

I remember physics class, where we were posed with the problem, what if one ship traveled .6 times the speed of light, while another ship traveled .6 times the speed of light in the opposite direction? From the first ship, would the second be traveling faster than light?

I thought we had broken physics, but alas, we just didn't yet understand time/space dilation yet.

Re:How long till

[FredFredrickson]

Or, will it retain the energy necessary?

Re:How long till

[kilfarsnar]

20 years of useful life? Speak for yourself buddy!

Re:What exists beyond?

[txoof]

Radio Lab has a great episode interviewing Ann Druyan, Carl Sagan's widow, regarding her part in developing the sound recordings for the voyager mission. She beautifully captures the art and love inherent in such an awesome act of science and exploration. If you have a free few minutes, you won't be sorry you listened.

Is V'Ger tied in with the Borg?

[jmcbain]

I never followed this part of the Trek continuum very closely. Is V'Ger tied in with the Borg somehow? I remember in ST:TMP that V'Ger had visited a "planet of living machines".

Re:Is V'Ger tied in with the Borg?

[slapout]

Personally, I try to forget ST:Voyager. Oh wait, you're talking about something different...

Re:Is V'Ger tied in with the Borg?

[Hamsterdan]

According to "The Return" by William Shatner, yes...

http://memory-alpha.org/wiki/V'Ger#Background_information

Makes more sense anyways than when they tried to explain why Klingons looked different in the train-wreck that was ST:Enterprise...

They already have

[Anonymous Coward]

NASA was got a take-down order when they posted the contents a few years back.

Re:Ive allready seen this

[iluvcapra]

That was a Pioneer -- the Voyagers don't have pictures of nekkid people bolted directly to the side.

Voyagers, thank you for what you have given me

[Slutticus]

The Voyager probes are approximately three months younger than me. All my life, I have followed the magical images and data these probes have been sending back to earth. In fact, it was the first images of saturn and jupiter that inspired me to be a scientist. It wasn't the pharma industry in which I work now. It wasn't the lure (lie?) of riches received for making the next big discovery. It was those probes, hurling through space sending back the most fascinating shit my young mind had ever witnessed. I spent almost my entire youth with my head buried in encyclopedias and books about astronomy, all made possible by Voyager 1 and 2. In the end I chose a different science path, but who knows...I could have ended up being a financial analyst (**shudders**)

Re:Voyagers, thank you for what you have given me

[Slutticus]

I forgot to mention, I'm probably going to cry when contact is lost with these guys.

Re:Voyagers, thank you for what you have given me

[Michael Woodhams]

but who knows...I could have ended up being a financial analyst

If you'd studied astronomy or physics, you likely would have.

Re:Voyagers, thank you for what you have given me

[bratloaf]

I'm a bit older than you, as I was 8 when they launched. I remember it actually, and a few years later when I was in middle school I was fortunate enough (and had teachers and administration that actually thought kids should learn and be exposed to things) that my class made a field trip to Cornell to hear Dr. Sagan speak. There was lots of talk about the voyagers, and we were allowed into a lab that had two huge tables filled with glossy prints of the actual images from Jupiter. I am sure that contributed greatly to my desire to go to college for science and engineering. I have followed every event to do with these probes over the years, I still have the newspapers from when the Saturn ring pics were all the rage. I HAD the book with record album when I was a teen. I somehow lost it in a move. Its worth quite a bit of money now... It will be a sad day indeed when contact is finally lost...

Re:Voyagers, thank you for what you have given me

[Risen888]

Me too. Voyager 1 had passed Jupiter before I was even born. More than the shuttle or the ISS or Hubble, Voyager got me interested in space. Even as a kid, the concept of this little microwave oven sized computer shot into space a zillion miles away that we could actually talk to and fix from home was...awe inspiring. I'm 30 this year, and I still feel that way.

Next milestone

[countertrolling]

intergalactic space..

How much longer until it leaves the galaxy? and then the super cluster?

the brain waves of a young woman in love

[SigmoidCurve]

I'm glad they didn't decide to record the brain waves of a young *man* in love... those would certainly make the aliens skeptical about ever visiting us.

"What did we learn from this Golden Record?"
"From what we can tell, we're dealing with a race that can't concentrate, constantly listens to The Smiths, worries about its hair looking right, broods pensively throughout the day, and fears never knowing the right things to say."
"On second thought, let's head out to Ursa Minor and see if we can find any intelligent life over there."

Re:the brain waves of a young woman in love

[phantomfive]

And you somehow think that the thoughts and feelings of a woman in love are more rational? Oh young one, the things you have to learn.

Re:the brain waves of a young woman in love

[JTsyo]

How would aliens even decode brain waves? I don't see the point of including them.

Re:the brain waves of a young woman in love

[FredFredrickson]

We were hoping they'd have a better crack at it than we do. Maybe they can send back the decoded female brain waves so we can finally figure out women... Yes! There's hope for us yet!

Obligatory Star Trek Motion Picture Reference

[guttentag]

So this is our last chance to tell it not to come back, saving future generations a lot of trouble and past generations from a mediocre movie.

How Long ?

[mbone]

It's not aimed at any other solar system, and the times involved are such that we can't predict what's going to happen very well.

In places like Wikipedia you will read things like

"in about 40,000 years [Voyager 1] will pass within 1.6 light years of the star AC+79 3888 in the constellation Camelopardalis."

but this is highly misleading. 1.6 light years is almost 1000 times further away from that star than either Voyager is from the Sun right now, so it won't in any sense be "in" that stellar system.

Worse, stars travel (relative to each other) at ~ 0.001 c, so even in 40,000 years all the nearby stars will move around by 10's of light years. We can estimate stellar velocities reasonably well, but their accelerations are very poorly measured, and so, after a few million years at most, we really don't know which star will go where.

The bottom line is, it will be millions of years before any of these spacecraft get as close to another star as they are now, and we have no idea which star that will be... ... unless, of course, our descendants pick them up and put them in a museum somewhere, which is what I would predict.

Re:How Long ?

[mbone]

The galaxy is a complicated place, dynamically speaking. There is the galactic rotation (~ 250 million years), which is roughly constant velocity around us, so there is a shear (stars closer to the center of the galaxy will orbit faster, as their orbits are physically smaller). There is the out of plane oscillation (most stars, including ours, bob up and down out of the galactic plane, like a cork). That has an estimated period for the Sun of 52 million years. There are in plane epicyclic motions (because of the spiral arms) with periods of order 175 million years. And, there are the accelerations from all of the local mass, most of which is "missing" - i.e., not associated with stars. Nearby stars have different velocities, and so close stars will drift apparent, and undergo different oscillatory motions.

None of these accelerations is observationally determined, and so must be estimated from models, which are pretty imprecise. Spacecraft in interstellar space will, of course, also be subject to all of these accelerations.

If you run the numbers, the total acceleration is about 2 x 10^-12 light years / year^2, and the error in that estimate might be as large as 50%, which would amount to 1 light year after a million years. Remember, in a million years, most stars will spread apart from each other by order 1000 light years. We don't even know all of the stars 100 light years away, much less 1000 light years away, and that far away our knowledge of the velocity (especially the transverse velocity) of the stars we do know is also poor.

So, after as short a time as 1 million years, we won't where the Voyagers (or Pioneers, or Pluto Express) are, or what stars they might be nearby, to within light years, and that is a lot of space.

Re:How Long ?

[popo]

Amazing how many here are convinced that we will travel the stars before self annihilation. The latter, by the way is more likely our current civilizational vector than a scientific utopia in which man roams impossible distances, expends infinite energy and overcomes the limitations of the human lifespan.

Re:How Long ?

[drooling-dog]

Unless interstellar travel becomes more profitable in the short term than waging senseless wars, I'd have to (sadly) agree with you.

Re:How Long ?

[Xyrus]

unless, of course, our descendants pick them up and put them in a museum somewhere, which is what I would predict.

You're making a large assumption that we will develop interstellar travel before we experience an ELE or kill each other through our own stupidity and prejudices. You're quite the optimist.

Re:How Long ?

[bhiestand]

Unless interstellar travel becomes more profitable in the short term than waging senseless wars, I'd have to (sadly) agree with you.

Impossible. Imagine I can produce a device capable of outputting enough energy to send a ship to another star in a human's lifetime (ignoring speed limits). Who should I sell it to?

Well, anyone with this device could literally rule (or destroy) the world. That's a lot of energy. So I could use it to capture the entire world's economy, sell it to a government that could essentially do the same, oooor I could sell it to a space tourism outfit that will manage to get a handful of billionaires to shell out some cash to take a ride on their new ship.

Or, with a fraction of that amount of energy, I could bring every asteroid to Earth, mine and process them, separating all of their elements, then bake a million tons of diamond, and have enough energy left over to power the entire planet for a while.

Shiny!

[Anonymous Coward]

Aww hell, I been to the edge. It just looked like... more space.

a tall funny man noted that

[rubycodez]

"Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind- bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space." -- D. Adams, HGTG

And the response from the rest of the galaxy is...

[Nom du Keyboard]

And the response from the rest of the galaxy is...that Earth is slapped with a littering charge and told to go out there and collect their refuse. Ignorance of intergalactic law is no excuse.

OBL: When I was a boy ...

[powerlord]

When I was a Boy by Frank Hayes:
Videos:
Faster Paced: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TnUFfy9ZhoE
Really Slow Paced: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p1fBd7UbQPA

Lyrics:
http://www.stevemacdonald.org/lyrics/wiwab.html

When I was a boy our Nintendo
Was carved from an old Apple tree
And we used garden hose to connect it
To our steam-powered color tv.

But it still beat that ancient Atari
'Cuz I almost went blind, don'tcha know,
Playing Breakout and Pong on a video game
Hooked up to the radio.

And we walked twenty miles to the schoolhouse
Barefoot, uphill both ways,
Through blizzards in summer and winter
Back in the good old days.
Back when Fortran was not even Three-tran
And the PC was only a toy
And we did our computing by gaslight
When I was a boy.

When I was a boy all our networks
Were for hauling in fish from the sea--
Our bawd rate was eight bits an hour (and she was worth it!),
And our IP address was just 3.

And you kids who complain that the World Wide Web
Is too slow oughtta cut out your bitchin',
'Cuz when I was a boy every packet
Was delivered by carrier pigeon

And we walked twenty miles to the schoolhouse
Barefoot, uphill both ways,
Through blizzards in summer and winter
Back in the good old days.
Back when Fortran was not even Two-tran
And the mainframe was only a toy
And we did our computing by torchlight
When I was a boy.

When I was a boy our IS shop
Built relational tables from wood,
And we wrappered our data in oilcloth
To preserve it the best that we could.

And we carried our bits in a bucket,
And our mainframe weighed 900 tons,
And we programmed in ones and in zeros
And sometimes we ran out of ones.

And we walked twenty miles to the schoolhouse
Barefoot, uphill both ways,
Through blizzards in summer and winter
Back in the good old days.
Back when Fortran was not even One-tran
And the abacus? Only a toy!
And we did our computing in primordial darkness
When I was a boy.

Re:OBL: When I was a boy ...

[sznupi]

And few lines from "Everybody's Free (To Wear Sunscreen)" by Baz Luhrmann

why not a space shuttle?

[jdogalt]

Am I the only person who read this, then remembering the decision of how to store the retiring shuttles, put two and two together? Perhaps even with one or more volunteers traveling some initial portion of the final leg, perhaps aimed for a swing around mars and a cargo bay full of food and water? Seriously??

Re:why not a space shuttle?

[MichaelSmith]

It would be like driving a flat water fishing boat across the Atlantic ocean. The shuttles are highly specialised vehicles designed for low earth orbit, and nothing else. Apollo on the other hand...

Re:why not a space shuttle?

[couchslug]

We have centuries to send TOURISTS. Better if they pay for it themselves, as befits a tourist enterprise.

How about following the example of Voyager and doing remote-manned EXPLORATION while perfecting the machines us meatsacks REQUIRE to survive the utterly hostile environment of space no matter where we send them?

Re:why not a space shuttle?

[Arlet]

Better fill that cargo bay with fuel if you want to escape Earth's gravity well.

Celestia (Re:How long till)

[interactive_civilian]

I've found that most people can't grasp how big space is. I can on a intellectual level but most people don't seem to understand just how distance even the closest stars are. I've met a few who thought a lightyear was the distance it took up to travel in a year in a modern space shuttle. But wow Voyager is going itno the black, I hope it doesn't turn into a Reaver.

Indeed. I always felt like I kind of "got it" on an intellectual level of matching big numbers to huge differences. But I realized that I didn't really get it until I started playing with Celestia, a free space simulator that lets you move around the universe using actual astronomical data. Everything is to scale in that program, and it really does give you a feel for just how big and empty space really is.

I highly recommend playing with it, for anyone who really wants to try to grasp the hugeness of space. :)

They may not last.

[arthurpaliden]

How long will it take the inter stellar dust to sand blast these probes down to nothing?

Re:They may not last.

[osu-neko]

Considering how thin it is, a very, very long time. They're far more likely to run into something bigger first...

AMAZING Nuclear Power (RTGs)

[wisebabo]

Wow, 275 watts of power FOR THIRTY YEARS (actually I think it was substantially higher at the beginning, exponential decay and everything).

This is in a device with no moving parts, about the size of a microwave oven (I think, but maybe that's just one of them), able to operate in interstellar cold and Jupiter's radiation belts, not to mention the vibration and acceleration of liftoff. Oh, and it has to survive an explosion on the pad or accidental re-entry!

If these things were cheap enough, we could use them to power our cars! (fat chance, the plutonium in them makes them highly appealing to all sorts of bad people)

Re:AMAZING Nuclear Power (RTGs)

[osu-neko]

If these things were cheap enough, we could use them to power our cars! (fat chance, the plutonium in them makes them highly appealing to all sorts of bad people)

"I'm sure in 1985 plutonium is available on every corner drugstore..." -- Doc Brown (1955)

The future sure ain't what it used to be...

Re:AMAZING Nuclear Power (RTGs)

[sznupi]

At 5% efficiency (or so). And with Watt not being very "large" unit - that 275 W is roughly 0.37 HP. Might be enough for a kick scooter. And you have one heck of a microwave oven (early "industrial" one?)

BTW, interstellar "cold" is not an issue; much less than efficient dumping of waste heat when there's no convection, just radiative heat transfer.

Re:AMAZING Nuclear Power (RTGs)

[arth1]

If these things were cheap enough, we could use them to power our cars! (fat chance, the plutonium in them makes them highly appealing to all sorts of bad people)

Yeah, undoubtedly, cops would have them, which means that criminals would have to get them too. That's two sorts right there.

I think there's basically two reasons that prevents this from being a reality.

First, the whole psychological fear factor. People are scared, and scared people don't think. While you'd have to make a containment vessel that can survive a fire, being hit by a bullet train, going off a mountain cliff, being shot at by a military drone plane, or any other incident likely to happen to at least one car, that's likely solvable. But getting lawyers, CEOs and politicians to sign off on it being safe is another matter. There'd be voters and shareholders ready to rip them to pieces (quite literally) if anything was perceived as going wrong.

Then, the economy. Half a billion vehicles would need an awful lot of an already scarce resource. It's not like we can easily manufacture more. We'd have to do deep mining, seawater extraction and all sorts of expensive tricks to get it. I'm not sure it would be economically feasible.

I think using hydrogen is a much better approach. Even without cold fusion.

Re:AMAZING Nuclear Power (RTGs)

[drinkypoo]

Hydrogen, really? I mean, really? It takes an awful lot to safely contain enough hydrogen to make its energy density worth a crap, and then you have to turn it into electric power with a fuel cell if you don't want to throw most of that energy away (unless we could dust off NASA's Stirling engine, I guess.) And the fuel cells are perpetually ten years away from production and use rare earth catalysts which wear out anyway.

At this point it doesn't even begin to make sense to use Hydrogen over batteries. If they can ever figure out how to make trivially recyclable fuel cells that are actually practical for automotive use then that might differ. But batteries are getting cheaper and better and fuel cells are still not on the market (nothing practical anyway.)

Re:AMAZING Nuclear Power (RTGs)

[Cheeko]

The somewhat depressing thing is that back 30 years ago NASA was given a supply of fuel by the Energy Department for RTG's. They were given a specific allotment of them that they could use over the years for various spacecraft.

If I recall correctly the last one is going into the new Mars rover (MSL/Curiosity).

Its a shame all the insane nuclear fear mongering is preventing them from really developing new RTG technology. I imagine with some decent research the things we could be doing with these would be incredible. Alas, we have things like the massive campaign to prevent New Horizon from launching for fear its plutonium would end up crashing back to earth.

Re:AMAZING Nuclear Power (RTGs)

[FlyingGuy]

That 275 watts is after 30 years of use. It started out at +/- 500 watts!

Re:AMAZING Nuclear Power (RTGs)

[sznupi]

Did you ever ask / check if it's NOT available? Particularly in 1985? (scepticism, and all ;) )

Re:AMAZING Nuclear Power (RTGs)

[sznupi]

But "they" are developing new RTG tech (Stirling one, for example)... NVM how it's not something you can improve much (kinda like nobody tries making ships with hulls ignoring Archimedes' principle, despite it being 2k+ years old)

There were no "massive" campaigns, just some protests here and there (a good thing, really; we don't want to go back to the recklessness with most things nuclear from the very early days, or allow unconditional nuclear-faithful take over). And Juno doesn't use them for practical reasons.

Oblig Futurama

[Veroxii]

We renamed it!

In 5 years, you'll all be really disappointed

[GodfatherofSoul]

...when it plinks off a glass wall with a bunch of LEDs and dust clouds painted on it.

Re:In 5 years, you'll all be really disappointed

[dargaud]

There was a real good short story with that theme, and the glass broke on impact... It was 'designed' to prevent interference from outside, and every star had one, thus we could travel away from our star, but not close to any other. The reason why was interesting...
Also remind me of a really cute comic book (in french).

Re:In 5 years, you'll all be really disappointed

[BorisAmmerlaan]

You're thinking of David Brin's "The Crystal Spheres".

Re:In 5 years, you'll all be really disappointed

[bhiestand]

Thanks! I was trying to remember the name of this as soon as he mentioned it.

John De Lancie

[Oxford_Comma_Lover]

> Don't you mean "read yourself when you type" ?

Unless you are Q, that sounds... confusing.

Re:John De Lancie

[FredFredrickson]

I the the Q qualifier is assumed here.

Forever is a pretty long time, indeed

[cmholm]

I didn't really wrap my mind around how time adds up over eternity until reading The Five Ages of The Universe . Forever, indeed.

Re:Speed challenge anyone?

[Hognoxious]

My take would be to go the StarTrek approach and use chemical rockets to fly toward the sun for a sling-shot.

What good would that do? You'd convert GPE to KE on the way in, and exactly reverse the process on the way out.

No, it's not powered by that CPU

[cculianu]

Nope, not true. Voyagers 1 & 2 are not powered by the RCA CDP1802, as is popularly believed.

The Voyager FAQ explains this, about halfway down the page:

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/faq.html

NASA's JPL says they custom-designed the processors on the two spacecraft and they were manufactured by General Electric (according to JPL specs).

This makes sense, actually, because if you are designing a spacecraft in the 1970s, you have very specific electrical, environmental and other requirements as compared to common off-the-shelf components which are designed with different (terrestrial) criteria in mind.

blinkers == Blinders

[CubicleView]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Blinders

Godspeed little probes!

[gelfling]

And you're welcome for all the fish.

Constantly reaching the "edge of space"

[jcasman]

I'm a major fan of the Voyager project and remember vividly the pictures of Saturn when I was in high school. The engineering involved is impressive, in any context. I'd just like to point out that depending on the definition of space, solar system or which of the two Voyagers we are talking about, this event has occurred quite a few times now in the press. A quick Google search of news reveals at least this many announcements about reaching the "edge of space."

2008: http://www.space.com/5586-voyager-spacecraft-reveals-solar-system-edge.html

2009: http://blogs.discovermagazine.com/80beats/2009/12/29/near-the-edge-of-the-solar-system-voyager-2-finds-magnetic-fluff/

2010: http://www.telegraph.co.uk/science/space/8201280/Voyager-1-reaches-edge-of-solar-system.html

Comment removed

[account_deleted]

Comment removed based on user account deletion

Ob. Portal 2

[DarthVain]

"We're not banging two rocks together here folks" - Cave Johnson

I have old stuff that works.

[www.sorehands.com]

I still use the microwave I bought in 1985.

I had a Zeis Ikon Cotraflex Super B which was over 35 years old, and still working, when I sold it.

Re:I have old stuff that works.

[MobileTatsu-NJG]

What'd you pay for each?

Re:I have old stuff that works.

[www.sorehands.com]

For the camera nothing. My grandfather bought it from a PX in the early 60s. He also bought a Roliflex 2.8C sometimes in the 50s which I had into the 70s, when it was stolen.

For the microwave, I think it was about $289 including tax.