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Celebrate Voyager's 40th Anniversary By Beaming A Message Into Outer Space (nytimes.com)
Long-time Slashdot reader Noryungi writes:
NASA will celebrate the 40th anniversary of the launch of the twin Voyager probes next month. So let us celebrate both the probes and the people who are still working on them, and nursing them in their final years.
The New York Times fondly profiles Voyager's nine aging flight-team engineers who "may be the last people left on the planet who can operate the spacecraft's onboard computers, which have 235,000 times less memory and 175,000 times less speed than a 16-gigabyte smartphone." NASA reports that now "Voyager 1 is in 'Interstellar space' and Voyager 2 is currently in the 'Heliosheath' -- the outermost layer of the heliosphere where the solar wind is slowed by the pressure of interstellar gas. " But the Times notes that the probes "are running out of fuel. (Decaying plutonium supplies their power.) By 2030 at the latest, they will not have enough juice left to run a single experiment."
NASA is now inviting the public to submit positive messages to be considered for beaming into space on September 5th -- the 40th anniversary of Voyager 1's launch. "Messages can have a maximum of 60 characters and be posted on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+ or Tumblr using the hashtag #MessageToVoyager," until August 15th, after which humanity will vote on which message should be sent.
The New York Times fondly profiles Voyager's nine aging flight-team engineers who "may be the last people left on the planet who can operate the spacecraft's onboard computers, which have 235,000 times less memory and 175,000 times less speed than a 16-gigabyte smartphone." NASA reports that now "Voyager 1 is in 'Interstellar space' and Voyager 2 is currently in the 'Heliosheath' -- the outermost layer of the heliosphere where the solar wind is slowed by the pressure of interstellar gas. " But the Times notes that the probes "are running out of fuel. (Decaying plutonium supplies their power.) By 2030 at the latest, they will not have enough juice left to run a single experiment."
NASA is now inviting the public to submit positive messages to be considered for beaming into space on September 5th -- the 40th anniversary of Voyager 1's launch. "Messages can have a maximum of 60 characters and be posted on Twitter, Instagram, Facebook, Google+ or Tumblr using the hashtag #MessageToVoyager," until August 15th, after which humanity will vote on which message should be sent.
My recommended message from the people of Earth: "Send Help."
You are welcome on my lawn.
The sunlight is mighty dim in that neighborhood. They get their power from RTGs - radiothermal generators. PU238 generates a lot of heat as it decays and semiconductor junctions turn it into electricity. But the PU238 decays, and the semiconductor junctions take a beating from the radiation sleeting through them, so the power package has a finite lifetime - which is just about done.
There is no God, and Dirac is his prophet.
68kB of memory? Don't you mean 64kB?
According to the Wikipedia article, the AC is right. Each probe has six computers; four with 4096 18-bit words each, and two with 8198 16-bit words each (not sure why its six over 2^13; maybe they're including CPU registers). That adds up to 557248 bits, or 68.02 KiB.
It's disingenuous to suggest that ONLY those 9 people can operate it. They may be most familiar (but, hey, can you remember the details of what you were doing 40 years ago?), but they're certainly not the only people precisely BECAUSE such documentation exists.
Hey, don't forget, we are still communicating with Voyager.
The problem is not that the tech was inherently more reliable back then, but it has a 40 year head-start. Sending out a probe today would give you pretty much the same kind of lag in technology by the time it gets to where these are, and nobody will really care much about what it's saying.
The problem we have is not that we can't go anywhere, or send another probe, or don't have the technology or know-how. It's that nobody wants to pay for it any more. You can't do much about that problem without finding someone willing to pay.