NASA to keep its 48-year-old Voyager 2 probe running for yet another year

Posted by wglb 2 hours ago

NASA to keep its 48-year-old Voyager 2 probe running for yet another year(www.space.com)

89 points | 11 comments

jvanderbot 1 hour ago|

I ran a few research tasks at JPL, small dollar studies. We'd often recruit part time work from engineers around the lab through informal networks, (instead of the official channels that segment by "specialization").

One year, one of the developers on my task was the apparently last person who could encode the command sequences for Voyager 2 (hoping memory serves me correctly - event though it was only 8 years ago). She would occasionally come late to meetings because they were dealing with some trouble with the old satellite.

Pretty amazing how little is set aside for these projects that most the staff keeping it alive have "day jobs". I hope she's still uploading

wildzzz 1 hour ago||

To be fair, nearly all of the science payloads on Voyager 1 & 2 have been shut down. The probes are doing very little. The doesn't take away from the very unique science they are doing but its a far cry from what the program offices were doing in 30-40 years ago. I'd expect anyone working on a Voyager probe in 2026 to need something else to do most of the day.

physicalecon 58 minutes ago||

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bcraven 1 hour ago||

Ah, good, an opportunity to recommend It's Quieter in the Twilight (2022). Beautiful documentary.

https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/

nullhole 1 hour ago||

Not a very good title, given that the subtitle for the very same article gives the important context that "Voyager 2 would have had to shut down one of its last remaining instruments later this year, until NASA made some power changes."

(as an aside, a celebratory coffee mug for when Voyager 1 finally gets to the 1-light-day-from-earth mark would be very popular, in case anyone from the JPL store is reading this. 'Yesterday's sunrise, today!')

plazmatic 43 minutes ago||

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dnw 1 hour ago|

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magicalhippo 39 minutes ago||

There's not a lot to do. They have enough hydrazine left to keep them pointing back at earth until 2040 or so[1]. So you could perhaps make them point in different directions for a bit, but that is risky as if something goes wrong we might lose contact. And there wouldn't be much point, since there's not enough power to use any of the cameras or other fancy instruments.

[1]: https://space.stackexchange.com/a/36009

xingped 1 hour ago|||

...did you seriously just say that? These spacecraft were developed with increidble expertise and intentionality. Give it to a "frontier model" and they'll destroy it faster than you can blink.

petterroea 54 minutes ago||

"Oops, you are right. I shut down the spacecraft, and now it will never boot again. Here's how it happened:"

icehawk 41 minutes ago|||

Why would it be fun? What do you think could be accomplished?

sailingparrot 37 minutes ago|||

Is this what AI psychosis looks like ? What are LLMs going to do? Flap the antenna at a specific frequency to achieve faster than light travel?

nofunsir 1 hour ago|||

What does this even mean? Hand our remote controlled flying nuclear powered Von Neumann state machine sensors over to matrix multiplication?

downrightmike 1 hour ago||

you don't have $20/mo?