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!”
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
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.
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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.
12.3 billion miles (19.9 billion kilometers)
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~181,400,000,000 American football fields
~97,930,000,000,000 bananas (assuming 8 inch bananas)For those using the metric system, that’s 97930 gigabananas.
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.
Have you tried shouting at it?
Or turning it off, waiting a bit, and back on again?
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 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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Communication wasn’t “lost”, it was thrown away through malpractice.
