• gedaliyah@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    It is just incredible to me that we have the ability and knowhow to send instructions to a 40 year old transistor computer to reprogram itself and get it working again with just radio signals.

    • Flying Squid@lemmy.worldOP
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      5 months ago

      What they did was close to wizardry.

      With no way to fix the chip, the team instead split the code up so it could be stored elsewhere. Initially they focused on reacquiring the engineering data, sending an update to Voyager 1 on 18 April 2024.

      It takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to travel the 24 billion kilometres (15 billion miles) out to Voyager 1, and the same back, meaning the spacecraft’s operations team didn’t receive a message back until 20 April.

      But when it arrived, they had usable data from Voyager 1 for the first time in five months.

      https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-missions/how-fixed-voyager-1

      • Wogi@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        Here’s a fun fact that I think of every time I read about light delay.

        We assume the speed of light is the same in all directions but there’s no way to prove that it is.

        It could be light speed is instantaneous in one direction, and half the speed we think it is in the reverse. Any test we could devise depends on information traveling in two directions, nullifying any discrepancies in light speed.

    • ripcord@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      …from 15.2 BILLION miles away.

      And it can reply by basically shining a (very high-frequency) flashlight back at us.

    • Buffalox@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      Incredible is the right word, how does this still work after more than 47 years? How do they even still have energy to send and receive signals? That’s one heck of a durable power source. How do the computers and sensors still work? The reliability and durability of these probes is amazing. NASA truly had some reality wizards doing what seems like magic to accomplish this.

      Either that or, aliens have been helping out and repaired it from time to time.

      • GamingChairModel@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        How do they even still have energy to send and receive signals? That’s one heck of a durable power source.

        It’s literally decaying plutonium-238. And because it decays, it’s putting out less power than when it started. They’ve shut down certain operations to conserve power, and obviously prioritize things like communication back to earth.

      • Cocodapuf@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        How do they even still have energy to send and receive signals? That’s one heck of a durable power source.

        Nuclear power, it packs a punch!