Always have a backup. You may not use it for 43 years, but you’ll be glad it’s there when you do.
I’m only 41 years old.
This recievier has been working for my whole life, goes out of service 15 billion miles away, turns on a backup reciever, and is now back in contact with NASA.
…but the ice cream machine at McDonalds is still broken.
Both are by design. The ice cream machine actually just got a DMCA exception so the company that makes it no longer can dictate who repairs it.
I’m picturing the Voyager 1 terminal is an ancient computer from the 1970s hooked up to a large parabolic antenna, and everyone is afraid to upgrade it because they might mess something up. I’m sure that’s not the case, but its what lives in my mind.
Since I was thinking about it I looked up some stuff: “So Voyager-1 does not “really” have a computer, in the sense that it does not have an operating system or RAM or a microprocessor. It was built in the 60s before any of this was invented and used CMOS-based microcontroller chips from Texas Instruments. Overall, it has a 16-bit processor and a MASSIVE memory of 70 KILOBYTES. That is smaller memory than a thumbnail of a phone image today, but it was enough to send images through which we discovered Jupiter has rings and much more.”
You can cram a load of machine language into 70K. Seems far more than needed, bet a bunch is for redundancy.
The obvious solution is to launch the ice cream machines into space.
Holy fuck is that* the real distance?
Aha, the famous back door: https://youtu.be/Joed0P3hhbc
Every few months there is a similar such story about this ancient marvel of technology and the people remotely maintaining it against all odds.
I can imagine a headline 100 years from now:
“Engineers are modifying Voyager 1 decorative panel bolt into a functional interstellar communicator”
A hacker has hijacked the communication relay and managed to install Doom on the Voyager. The game runs perfectly but the user interface is reported to be somewhat laggy.
Humans will be extinct, and Voyager will still be carrying our mixtape through eternity.
Whenever someone tells me 1 GiB of RAM isn’t enough, i think of Voyager.
Let’s see Voyager load up Chrome real quick
Voyager is it’s own search engine. Why would it need chrome?
Voyager wasn’t written in JavaScript, to Web 2.0
And still it won’t quit.
It is quite legit.
I get it. Sometimes my voice gets hoarse too.
Talk about a slow troubleshooting process. Thats, what, 80,000,000ms latency?
And any useful answer thread on stackoverflow is archived.
Your post “Received error code 0459 from 1981 JPL Transmitter Array” has been marked as a Duplicate.
