NASA’s Voyager 2 has lost communication with Earth due to an unintentional shift in its antenna direction. The next programmed orientation adjustment on October 15 is expected to restore communication, while Voyager 1 continues to operate as usual.
A series of scheduled commands directed at NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft on July 21 led to an unintentional change in antenna direction. Consequently, the antenna moved 2 degrees off course from Earth, causing the spacecraft to lose its ability to receive commands or transmit data back to our planet.
As a software engineer I feel for the person who accidentally sent the wrong value and caused an icon to be offline, potentially forever.
It’s not going to be offline forever. It’ll reorient in a couple months. It was designed to do this when comms are lost. Still a little scary though.
This assumes their understanding of what caused the problem is accurate.
Should it be ever so slightly imprecise, it could mean we lose contact forever.
This is one of those things that sounds meaningful, but can be said about literally any problem in any system. Not all knowledge requires the same level of precision for confidence.
If the engineers at NASA who are familiar with the system say this is a known error state that will be fixed the next time the system designed to correct it fires on its set schedule, there’s not a whole lot added by saying sure, but what if they’re wrong?
It’s just restating the table stakes of existence.
But what if I, armchair scientist on Lemmy, sees a flaw in the plan of some of the greatest engineers in the world? Doesn’t the world deserve to know what I think about the communications system I just became aware of today?
Lol. The knee-jerk contrarianism online really gets under my skin, especially when it’s towards experts.
Like yeah, sometimes experts are wrong or systems don’t behave as expected. But framing that as some sort of erudite insight really bugs me.
“I hope the recovery system works!” doesn’t need to be rewritten as “Mmm yes. But what these engineers haven’t considered is the possibility that they are wrong”.
I had a laugh at this line:
It’s just restating the table stakes of existence.
Brilliantly put. It’s like saying to a stranger on an airplane, “If these pilots don’t know how to fly, we are gonna die!”
Plot twist… he is the lead engineer on the team.
No but the experts could be right or wrong. Two possibilities so that means there’s a 50/50 chance.
/s
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I smoke two joints before I smoke two joints and then I smoke two more
No, the level of precision that is required for this is quite literally unprecedented. You can try and dig at my post all you want, but it just seems like you have an axe to grind.
Precision for what? Knowing their cron job will fire? Knowing what was wrong with the commands they sent? Neither of those are crazy precise or ambiguous statements?
The only highly precise thing that needs to happen is the alignment of the antenna but that system has been working for decades already and has been thoroughly tested.
NASA tends to be pretty straightforward when talking about risks, and if they feel like all the systems are in working order and there’s a good chance we’ll be back in contact with it, I think it’s worth talking them at their word.
Like yeah, it’s impressive they can aim an antenna that precisely, but using stars to orient an object is a very very well understood geometry problem. NASA has been using that technique at least as far back as Apollo
The only highly precise thing that needs to happen is the alignment of the antenna but that system has been working for decades already and has been thoroughly tested.
When was the last time the maneuvering jets were fired off? Especially so in the crafts current condition of it being in a very low power mode? They may know the craft and its design well but they’re not there seeing the craft in its current condition to know if things will work as they would want them to.
There’s a million things that can go wrong that they’re not aware of, his original comment is actually correct and not worthy the attack it’s getting. There’s always the unknown when you’re working with hardware and software, especially in deep space.
And my axe.
I think if there’s anyone that knows anything about telemetry, it’s NASA. These machines have been engineered for these scenarios for decades by some of the most unfathomably brilliant minds that have straight dedicate their lives to this. The science of this has been confirmed by similarly brilliant minds the world over.
I don’t think I’m prepared to lose another space robot.
You’re right, internet stranger. I bet they have not considered the possibility that Voyager 2 might have been eaten by a space whale. Like why aren’t the lame-stream fake news channels even discussing the space whale theory. Voyager 2 might even be intact inside the belly of the beast, and if NASA engineers haven’t factored this new data into their calculations about how fast a space whale would float through space with the additional mass and inertia of a functional probe, the signal could be lost forever.
I challenge Neil Degrass Tyson to a debate about space whales and how much they would theoretically be able to swallow whole.
rm -rf /telemetry-data
rm really predates the start of voyager 2.
That can’t be right. Is it?
They’re going to have a very tough time sleeping between now and mid-October.
But also the whole thing is a science project and it has gone incredibly well so far.
I understand striving for perfection and everything but NASA is just about hurling things into outer space to collect data in a calculate manner. There have been worse mistakes that killed people in varying degrees of bad ways.
Unmonitored, it will slowly evolve into V’ger now!
At 38,000mph, it will be approximately 80 billion miles away from Earth in 2271. That’s .013 light years from Earth. Future generations may pass it by while staring out the window and laugh at how archaic our technology was.
No may, they will definitely laugh at most of it. “What do you mean they had to use their eyes to watch videos? It wasn’t just beamed directly into their head?”
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🥲
Sometime between now and 2271!
That’s too far into the future, maybe 2271
V’GINY
Mmmm… V’gussy…
There’s actually a group of alien teenagers following it and occasionally giving it a spin or nudge, just to fuck with us. They think its hilarious.
Fucking Neutrinos.
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How many football fields is that? I’ll also accept the distance in bananas.
~181,400,000,000 American football fields
~97,930,000,000,000 bananas (assuming 8 inch bananas)assuming 8 inch
My, we are feeling bold aren’t we?
it’s a warm day!
You’ve definitely done the TMI calculation, and surely corrected for yaw
For those using the metric system, that’s 97930 gigabananas.
97.9 TB(anana)
For those using imperial units, that’s 1 bananalamadingdong.
100.0 TiB(anana)
You mean 9793e10 bananas?
The weird thing to me is that that’s only about 23 football fields per person on earth. In other words, if each of us walks a mile and a half, all together we will have moved further than Voyager 2.
Doesn’t the average person like walk a mile and a half everyday? That’s around 4,000 steps which apparently I do without even knowing about it.
Doing my part to lower the average!
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Hero
Once you reach the billions, I don’t imagine miles or kilometers make much of a difference anyway. It isn’t like it helps visualize anything any better, does it?
It’ll reconnect and align back the next time it pings back to Earth. It was designed for this kind of contingency. It’s very unlikely its lost forever.
What a great project. Really puts perspective on what can be accomplished with public funds and vision. Meanwhile shit like Starlink exists and lasts maybe a couple of years. I wonder whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy???
As much as I’d like to agree, those projects have very different goals and constraints.
As much as I hate Musk and most of his idiot projects, Starlink isn’t that bad of an idea. Traditional SATCOM internet is more expensive for shittier service. From what I’ve read, Starlink has been fairly reliable, not overly expensive, and performance is pretty solid. Sure, in areas that already have “excellent” terrestrial internet providers available, it is pretty useless. But for rural areas, it’s a godsend.
It’s 100% a good idea, it just shouldn’t be privately owned
But private companies can do things public companies can’t do!1
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Because private companies don’t have the GOP actively sabotaging them whenever they are in power so that they can argue that private companies work better than public ones.2
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Unless your private company supports groups that the GOP hates.
Please don’t help infect this place with partisan politics. This is my safe haven.
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Very well. What government would you like to trust with this that can pull it off?
The US government? Heck I am confident that somewhere deep in federal bowls is my entire porn viewing history with my name on it. Also the US government only has SLS so to launch these they would have to build a new rocket or give the launch contracts to, well you guessed it SpaceX. Unless of course there is some more lobbying in which case ULA (Boeing) or Bezos. Tell me which poison you would prefer.
Russia? Seriously? Not even as a joke.
China? Maybe Russia wasn’t such a bad pick.
The minor space powers? South Korea, India, Israel, Japan? Even combined they couldn’t.
That just leaves the ESA (basically France and Luxembourg) which they are multiple years away from finishing their reusable rocket and only have one big launch site.
I am not against the idea of some government deciding that being an ISP to oceans and rural areas would be a good service and a nice revenue stream I just don’t see which government can do it and be trust too.
Because they’re low orbit communication satellites that require a lot of fuel to maintain said orbit, and are designed to deorbit pretty quickly so as to not pollute LEO with junk?
It isn’t apple to apples. I saw a doc once on it where they interviewed the engineers involved and one was honest how he didn’t really follow orders and padded it. If there were two options for a given component he picked the one that would last longer not the cheaper one. While other systems are designed to use as little material and cheap material as possible because they are intended to die after a few months and be mass produced.
Additionally it didn’t have vision. The original plan was to do the whole solar system. NASA was concerned about overpromising and budget issues so they told their staff to set the goal of up to Saturn only.
I personally think there is plenty of room for both commercial and public. Ideally I would like to see public take on this very scientific no practical application stuff and projects that are too risky while commercial brings down the cost.
Commercial brings down the cost
That is just another way of saying imposes negative externalities.
I am wary of commercial anything, I don’t really trust any company. We are still having major pollution events, some being planned to this day. And even some of the smallest, most seemingly benevolent startups sometimes turnout out to be so evil they are literally scamming people out of life.
Maybe once we have real jail time for executives and the corporate death penalty by destruction of charter and a little bit of a time period without an event of awful corporate negligence, maybe then space commercialization might be a net benefit.
That is just another way of saying imposes negative externalities.
I think you know that you were oversimplifying here. It isn’t some weird-ass energy balance thing where all you can do is move the problem around. About half of my work is on government contracts and I can tell you first hand that it is very easy to make a bad project that costs more and gain nothing from it. I have personally been in multihour meetings with 6 or so engineers (with those billable hours) just to endlessly discuss the solution to the problem that had already been solved.
Just go ahead and pick some process you do in your daily life and try to do it inefficiently with no gain. You will find that it is trivially easy to do. There are more ways for something to be wrong vs being right. Which means that being right one way doesn’t mean that all ways of being right are equal.
I am wary of commercial anything
I won’t tell you not to be. Go ahead and be wary of it makes you feel better. I am wary of spending another 50 years stuck in LEO.
maybe then space commercialization might be a net benefit.
There is and never was a space program without commercial partners. It is only the question of to what degree. As of right now the HLS operating costs are far below the space shuttle program, less polluting, and should be safer. Given that half of the program failed that is even more of an achievement with the remaining 50%.
Have you tried shouting at it?
Or turning it off, waiting a bit, and back on again?
Wonder if we could ping it off one of the other satellites we have around other planets to get a message out to it. Fingers crossed it’s back in contact by October and we don’t have to try weird shit though
I would imagine 2° at 12 billion miles means it’s almost certainly not pointing at anything man-made anymore, but I’m also not an astrophysicist so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Being that far out I don’t even think we could go out and fix it anymore
Lol no we most certainly cannot go out and fix it.
yet
But by the time we could there would be zero reason to anyway
I could see some far-future humans intercepting the Voyagers, catching them, and putting them in a museum somewhere.
And even if it was pointed at random human equipment it’s so far away that you need a very special radio and antenna; not just any old satellite is necessarily going to do the trick. I think the signal strength is around -196db iirc so incredibly faint, and The antennas they use to communicate with voyager are massive.
Oh absolutely not. I’m just wondering if we could get stupidly lucky XD maybe it happens to be pointing at Voyager 1 (honestly idk how the trigonometry works out but maybe New Horizons?? Lol)
A shift of 2° at 12.3 billion miles means it’s now pointing about 430 million miles away from the earth. The likelihood that it would be pointing at one of the small handful of man made objects that are out that far is infinitesimally small. Imagine being in a filed 100 miles wide and spinning a bottle with a laser pointer on it and hoping it lands pointing at a single bottle cap at the edge of the field. That would be magnitudes more likely than this pointing at one of our objects. And even if it did, those also would have antennas pointed at Earth so they couldn’t receive the message without turning which might cause the same issue for them.
We’re talking about the most proverbially gone shit in human history. Not only is it too far away, it is going faster than any man-made object has ever gone.
…And we once launched a massive metal disc out of a giant bore hole with a nuclear explosion.
Edit: actually Operation Plumbbob sent the steel bore cap nearly 4x as fast as Voyager. Suck it, nerds.
The fastest man-made object would be the NASA Parker Solar Probe spacecraft which reached a speed of 535,000 kilometers per hour…0.05% of the speed of light
Holy shit, that’s significantly faster than a steel plate that was launched by a nuke and subsequently vaporized. Insane. Thank you
I’d guess even if some other man made satellite is perfectly in line, those wouldn’t have even close to the necessary transmission power to reach voyager.
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If I read it correctly, the probe checks periodically, and if it loses contact, it uses the location of known stars to point its antenna back towards the Earth. If that doesn’t work, it’s gone.
Communication wasn’t “lost”, it was thrown away through malpractice.
What? My guy it temporary. In a couple of months it will reorient itself automatically
Son, what do you think the term “malpractice” means?
We may be entitled to compensation?
