>>belter+(OP)
In short, it was remote bricked, by giving it commands to rotate a bit. After successfully executing those commands - no further commands could be received, as now the antennas are not facing earth anymore.

But luckily it automatically readjust itself to earth automatically every half year exactly for these events. So on 15.10 we will know, if it is really lost. In either case, the end of its mission is near anyway, because the nuclear batteries are near its end.

edit: Nasa has a blog post on this https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2023/07/28/mission-update-voy...

>>eimrin+m6
0.5003% of the maximum velocity of a sheep in a vacuum (1)

(1) https://www.theregister.com/Design/page/reg-standards-conver...

>>eimrin+m6
Apparently 32 billion km is about 29.65 light hours, so to catch up we'd need a magical massless spacecraft to travel at the speed of light for a bit over a day to reach it. Hopefully that demonstrates how utterly infeasible it would be to reach it.

It's also near the end of its usable life so it wouldn't be worth it anyway.

And actually, according to https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/ it's actually 19,936,472,690 km from Earth so I think like 20ish light hours or so.

>>5d4140+Pb
A 70 metre antenna with enough control to point in the right direction. As voyagers batteries are meant to die in a couple of years, there’s probably more interesting things to do with your money.

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/news/details.php?article_id=118

>>belter+(OP)
Dave from EEVBlog just visited a facility communicating with Voyager 2:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=586Zn1ct-QA

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vUvzgZt1Vug

There's a part 3 with a tour of the complex.

>>albert+xd
Voyager 2 is approximately 20 billion km from the Sun

Earth is approximately 150 million km from the Sun

Sunlight intensity falls off with the square of distance (ignoring any additional small losses from space dust / scattering from gases etc), so twice the distance = a quarter the solar flux. At the Earth it's ~1361 watts per square meter.

Voyager 2 is approximately 133 times further from the Sun than Earth is, which means it receives optimistically 1361 / (133^2) = 0.07694 watts per square meter.

I found a JPL article [1] that says the RTG onboard Voyager produces 40% less power than it did at launch, and the Wikipedia article [2] says it produced 470W at launch, which means it makes ~280W now.

Wikipedia [3] suggests the solar panels available at the time of Voyager's launch in the late 1970s could convert ~10% of incoming solar power to electricity. Modern panels bring that up to 30% but the designers of Voyager did not have access to time travel.

So at present distance Voyager would need approximately 36000 square meters of solar panel to produce the same amount of power.

[1] https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/a-new-plan-for-keeping-nasas-o...

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2#Power

[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_panels_on_spacecraft#His...

>>jl6+sb
You mean sending this antenna to space?

https://megous.com/dl/tmp/95ce96af5966be24.png

:)

>>louthy+n9
If you ignore much of the majority English-speaking world, then yes, that would be accurate.

https://brilliantmaps.com/football-vs-soccer/

>>belter+(OP)
Official blog post from a few days ago:

>>36909736

>>albert+1d
Start at the Voyager book at https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/summary.html .

>>hutzli+79
This link from NASA mentions the October 15 date:

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-mission-update-voyager-2-...

>>albert+1d
Good video on the topic - there is a sun sensor on the dish - looks for the brightest object and orients to face it. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=NbsHgE89qO4&t=340s

>>eimrin+m6
The number is wrong to begin with, Voyager 2 is about 20 billion kilometers from Earth [1] if I did not do the conversion incorrectly as NASA shows it in miles only.

[1] https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/

>>inopin+hb
I expect that a technical publication will be available soon at one of these sources: https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/ https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/science/data-access/

>>eimrin+m6
Here's a 'wrong' but possibly helpful comparison, in the spirit of football fields:

32 billion kilometers is about 100 times the distance a satellite travels from earth to Mars. [1]

That Earth-Mars trip is estimated in the same article to take 4 months, so figure 400 months or 30+ years to shoot another satellite out to reach Voyager 2.

This is ignoring planetary slingshot math, the extra speed to 'catch' voyager 2, and surely lots of other details. Personally I find years and "mars" to be more intuitive in this case than trillions of football fields.

[1]https://mars.nasa.gov/mars2020/timeline/cruise/#:~:text=The%....

>>hutzli+zE
What this is telling us is that attempting to condense to "it was bricked" has actually introduced ambiguity, and that "brick" doesn't really explain a technical situation.

The JPL doco (>>36941433 >>36942321 ) calls it "Command Loss".

>>albert+it
The Voyager Neptune Travel Guide mentions things like the Canopus Star Tracker and the Sun Sensor.

https://ntrs.nasa.gov/citations/19900004096

>>ck2+P61
I assume star tracking -- wikipedia seems to confirm

"... and celestial referencing instruments (Sun sensor/Canopus Star Tracker) to maintain pointing of the high-gain antenna toward Earth"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2

>>gottor+0o
> As a member of said public, I would be curious to know. There's no need for taxpayer-funded agencies to operate in a cloak of darkness.

This is what the Freedom of Information Act is for:

https://www.nasa.gov/centers/armstrong/FOIA/request.html

The report may not exist yet, so you may need to wait.

>>pstuar+Ua1
Space opera is my favorite genre but I've failed to get through the Foundation series probably 20 times now so this may be terrible advice but it's recommended to not read them in publication order by Asimov himself.

This has a good breakdown: https://www.reddit.com/r/Asimov/wiki/seriesguide/

edit: Somehow I got Foundation mixed up with Banks' Culture series. I think I have gotten through most of Foundation if not all but I've had a hard time with the Culture series, there I usually start with Player of Games..

>>swozey+Vj1
The Culture series is good but I've struggled with getting through it all as well. If you like space opera I can highly recommend the Honor Harrington series, the first book being On Basilisk Station [0]. This has held up for me for well over a decade and I've reread the entire series (~14 books IIRC) at least 4-5 times. I've heard it described as "Horatio Hornblower in space" but I never read that series so I can't speak to that.

[0] https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/35921.On_Basilisk_Statio...

>>guraf+Oq1
Voyager 2 has a direction radio antenna, not a laser producing a sharp-edged beam.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2#Communications

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parabolic_antenna#Beamwidth

How about this antenna? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Very_Large_Array

Or this one? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Five-hundred-meter_Aperture_Sp...

>>belter+(OP)
Stub for arguing about what "bricked" means. These comments were originally replies to >>36941191 , but we moved them because the offtopic discussion was choking the thread.

Normally I'd have marked the entire subthread offtopic, but hutzlibu's comment deserves to be at the top, even if it does use the word "bricked" wrong.

>>sqrt_1+1u
How bright does the Sun appear compared to other stars at a distance of 32Bn km?

Here is a photo from Voyager 1 at a distance of 4Bn miles:

https://photojournal.jpl.nasa.gov/catalog/PIA00450

>>hutzli+79
All: if you want to argue about what "bricked" means, please do that at >>36946612 , not here. But also consider: "Please don't pick the most provocative thing in an article or post to complain about in the thread. Find something interesting to respond to instead." - https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

>>5d4140+Pb
These guys[1] hacked a NASA space probe and refired its motors. I read the entire blog once but I can't remember if there was any sort of encryption on the communication, although I know that was brought up. Modern probes do use cryptography, but I doubt Voyager does. I suspect if you fired commands at it you could control it. For the lulz or whatever.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Cometary_Explore...

>>midori+kc
They made some updates and expect it to go through 2026

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/news/details.php?article_id=129

>>beefor+08
They made some updates and expect it to go through 2026

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/news/details.php?article_id=129

>>5d4140+Pb
If you want to decode the downlink of a more recent probe, here's the details (apparently NASA don't have the source code for the decoder, but a binary was found):

https://skyriddles.wordpress.com/2023/07/03/stereo-a-comes-h...

>>Nikola+kF1
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_data_breaches

>>mcguir+PH1
https://web.archive.org/web/20031218192524/http://w3.uwyo.ed...

>>kyleye+2K1
that's nuts!

"- African dung beetles orient to the starry sky to move along straight paths

- The beetles do not orientate to the individual stars, but to the Milky Way"

https://www.cell.com/current-biology/fulltext/S0960-9822(12)...

https://www.science.org/content/article/dung-beetles-navigat...

>>qingch+yB1
It's hard to find anything about older programs, but they currently put a lot of work into simulators.

https://www.nasa.gov/sites/default/files/ivv_grubb_nasa_ivv_...

On the other hand, at one time there was a physical "proof test model" of the Voyagers.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia21734-voyager-test-model-...

>>gregsa+j91
Sorry to self-reply, but this Q&A on "Space Overflow" about this specific star tracker is great:

https://space.stackexchange.com/questions/43803/how-did-the-...

>>datade+232
https://youtu.be/NT8-b5YEyjo

>>wizofa+dY1
It's apparently from the 50s, as seen here: https://archive.org/details/sim_electronics-now_1959-03_30_3...

>>joshst+zn1
Incidentally, On Basilisk Station is a free e-book at the publisher's website [0]. They also have an online HTML version [1]. So you can try the first book in the series to see how you like it before purchasing any of the others.

[0] https://www.baen.com/on-basilisk-station.html

[1] https://www.baen.com/readonline/index/read/sku/0743435710

>>qingch+Ay1
Trying to see if I can work this out.

Voyager 2 is 160.7 AU.

Light falls off in brightness to the distance squared. So the sun will be 160.7^2 = 25824.5 times fainter for Voyager 2 than it is from Earth. (Since Earth is at 1AU)

The apparent magnitude of the sun from Earth is -26.72. Each step in magnitude is multiplying by 2.512. (2.512^5 = 100, so 5 steps of magnitude is a factor of 100).

log2.512(25824.5) = 11.0295.

11.0295 + -26.72 = -15.6905.

The apparent magnitude of the full moon is only −12.74 (lower is brighter). So for Voyager 2 the sun is still several times brighter than we see the moon. The sun is still many many times brighter than the next brightest star in the sky, Sirius, which has an apparent magnitude of −1.46.

Sources: Voyager 2 distance is https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/ all else is Wikipedia.

>>belter+(OP)
> The probe is currently around 32 billion kilometers from Earth

No it isn't. It's 20 billion kilometers. It's closer than Voyager 1.

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/

>>ck2+P61
I should point at that astronomical navigation is a remarkable skill that was developed and turned into routine calculations in a relatively short period of time. The first order calculations are based on star imaging and used a Kalman filter,which had been invented just a few years before (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kalman_filter#History) along with a star catalog (list of known star locations relative to the sun/earth) and direct observation by astronauts. I think a sextant was useful.

Second order calculations use careful analysis of the signal pattern in telemetry data- IIRC you can see a slow stretch of the phase which can be used to estimate distance and velocity with high accuracy.

Voyager, along with Apollo, stand as the finest examples of human engineering done yet- we got a bunch of people to the moon and back, and built a probe that still operates 50 years later... farther than anything else humans have launched... I'd be lucky if I can deploy my web app once a week.

>>rcxdud+pC
I was amused to learn that if modern satellites lose contact with earth, they go into "safe mode": pointing towards sun, solar panels fully deployed, everything else except telemetry, radio, and temperature management disabled, waiting for further instructions. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Safe_mode_in_spacecraft

Imagine deploying a billion dollar piece of hardware and hoping that it has enough intelligence to keep itself from burning up before you can reestablish contact!

>>fnord7+703
No, I'm not.

Here is the Australian Standard for Caravan and light trailer towing components, Part 1: Towbars and towing brackets

https://store.standards.org.au/product/as-4177-1-2004

There are thousands of these documents covering everything to do with transport from the vehicles to the reflectivity of street signs.

The regulation (at least in my state) is that only engineers who are registered as Registered Engineers are permitted to carry out professional engineering services in this state.

>>sheeps+nW3
Yes, what you're describing is two different approaches for safety analysis. According to the NASA software engineering handbook [1]

"Software Fault Tree Analysis (SFTA) is a top-down approach to failure analysis which begins with thinking about potential failures or malfunctions (What could go wrong?) and then thinking through all the possible ways that such a failure or malfunction could occur. Fault Tree Analysis (FTA), is often used by the hardware teams to identify potential hazards that might be caused by failures in hardware components or systems, but with the SFTA, the software isn’t considered the hazard, but it can be a cause or contributor when considered in the context of the system."

"The Software Failure Modes and Effects Analysis (SFMEA) is a bottom up approach where each component is examined and all the possible ways it can fail are listed. Each possible failure is traced through the system to see what effect it might have on the system and to determine if it results in a hazardous state. Then the likelihood of the failure and the severity of the system failure can be considered."

But, to the earlier post, these are driven by hard requirements; specifically adherence to NASA STD 7150.2 and NPR 7150.2. Developers/contractors can tailor/waive them with pre-approval but, in general, they tend to go in the direction of less requirements, not more. This may all be moot because I think Voyager pre-dates any of those requirement documents and I'm not sure what existed in the late 1970s.

[1] https://swehb.nasa.gov/

>>__alex+IY1
I don't think so, but there were gryojets, which were half way there. They were bullet-sized rockets fired from a gun with an unrifled barrel that accelerated as they flew, exceeding Mach 1 at terminal velocity.

Supposedly you could literally slap them out of the air if you were at the muzzle, when they had just begun accelerating.

They were in the James Bond movie You Only Live Twice.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gyrojet