Comment on Voyager 1 stops communicating with Earth
NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 11 months agoThat’s fantastic, that means all they have to do is reset some components and it should restore functionality. I say should, it’s still a scary thing to turn on/off components om a satellite bcz you aren’t guaranteed they’ll come on. Nasa people usually prefer soft resets to hard resets of components, but we’ll see what happens.
One of the satellites I worked on had to have a software update to do a soft reset of a component every time it tried to write certain data. It was really scary bcz we thought we had lost one of our redundancies right after launch, which would have sucked.
But, we didn’t. Anyway, just wanted to give a little bit of insight into what the FOT might be thinking about while they’re trying to recover the satellite to nominal state.
originalfrozenbanana@lemm.ee 11 months ago
Yeah I got very sad when I saw the headline and breathed a huge sigh of relief. Voyager 1’s death will be far sadder than most public figures. Maybe any.
NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Same, for a moment I was really concerned. Voyager is like a lifetime achievement for humanity at this point. When it stops communicating its going to be a big loss for the scientific community, and population as a whole. I’m not looking forward to hearing about its loss of functionality in the next decade or so.
postmateDumbass@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Will we ever reach as far again?
Meowoem@sh.itjust.works 11 months ago
I think when we have space based fuel and fabrication infrastructure we’ll be able to make some interesting projects, some huge thing that just burns its rockets at full power through the solar system.
Or a very robust probe fired from a giant nuclear cannon on the dark side of the moon. If you start the journey at top speed that cuts out all the acceleration time, we could have stuff popping off in every direction.
NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world 11 months ago
I really can’t say, I’m not privy to any of the outer solar system projects that might be in the works. Voyager was originally intended to do flyby of the outer planets, and then it headed out of the solar system. I think the trajectory was always designed with the idea that it could exit the solar system. As far as I’m aware, we’ve done a few missions to asteroids, but nothing that is going out to do flyby of the outer planets. But, I could be wrong, don’t take my word for it. All of the stuff I have worked on has been near earth, or pointing away from the earth but still within the vicinity of L1 and L2 Lagrange points.
You’d be surprised how many missions nasa has in the works at any one time.
deweydecibel@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Wait till it returns as V’ger
TheRealKuni@lemmy.world 11 months ago
Or the Mighty V-GINY.
BearOfaTime@lemm.ee 11 months ago
You waited 40 years to be able to use that.
Hats off to you.
gazter@aussie.zone 11 months ago
I don’t know if I would consider Voyager to be ‘dead’ if it stops transmitting.
If I put a message in a bottle, with a blinky light on it, then throw it into the ocean, the message is still there even if the blinky light goes out.