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posted by takyon on Sunday August 20 2017, @06:45PM   Printer-friendly
from the get-out-of-my-solar-system dept.

NASA's Voyager mission was launched 40 years ago:

NASA's historic Voyager mission has now been exploring the heavens for four decades.

The Voyager 2 spacecraft launched on Aug. 20, 1977, a few weeks before its twin, Voyager 1. Together, the two probes conducted an unprecedented "Grand Tour" of the outer solar system, beaming home up-close looks at Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and many of the moons of these giant planets.

This work revealed a jaw-dropping diversity of worlds, fundamentally reshaping scientists' understanding of the solar system. And then the Voyagers kept on flying. In August 2012, Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft ever to reach interstellar space — and Voyager 2 is expected to arrive in this exotic realm soon as well.

The rest of the article is a Q&A with Voyager project scientist and former director of the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory Ed Stone.

Also at BBC and NBC. Image gallery at Ars Technica. A PBS special about the mission will air on August 23.

No missions have been sent to Uranus or Neptune since Voyager 2 visited them in 1986 and 1989.

Related: Pioneer and Voyager Maps to Earth: How Much of a Mistake?
Voyager's 'Cosmic Map' Of Earth's Location Is Hopelessly Wrong


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  • (Score: 3, Interesting) by takyon on Sunday August 20 2017, @08:09PM (4 children)

    by takyon (881) <reversethis-{gro ... s} {ta} {noykat}> on Sunday August 20 2017, @08:09PM (#556773) Journal

    I'll just reuse this comment [soylentnews.org].

    As for the software [popularmechanics.com]:

    The last true software overhaul was in 1990, after the 1989 Neptune encounter and at the beginning of the interstellar mission. "The flight software was basically completely re-written in order to have a spacecraft that could be nearly autonomous and continue sending back data to us even if we lost communication with it," Dodd said. "It has a looping routine of activities that it does automatically on board and then we augment that with sequences that we send up every three months."

    --
    [SIG] 10/28/2017: Soylent Upgrade v14 [soylentnews.org]
    Starting Score:    1  point
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  • (Score: 4, Insightful) by maxwell demon on Sunday August 20 2017, @08:58PM (1 child)

    by maxwell demon (1608) on Sunday August 20 2017, @08:58PM (#556778) Journal

    Note that the Voyager computers have just 4K of memory. Most programmers of today would be hard pressed to write a Hello World program that fits into that.

    --
    The Tao of math: The numbers you can count are not the real numbers.
    • (Score: 2) by fyngyrz on Sunday August 20 2017, @10:01PM

      by fyngyrz (6567) on Sunday August 20 2017, @10:01PM (#556797) Journal

      We're not all dead yet. Not quite dead.

      Think I'll go for a walk and think about assembly.

      Where's my damned cane? MARTHA!?!?

  • (Score: 4, Informative) by tonyPick on Monday August 21 2017, @07:00AM

    by tonyPick (1237) on Monday August 21 2017, @07:00AM (#556901) Homepage Journal

    I'm also going to point out that you can download the original data from the Voyager data archives, from http://pds-rings.seti.org/archives/VG_0xxx/ [seti.org]

    You can pretty much hack through this data to get the original images, which I think is a neat thing to do. I wrote a couple of howto articles on it here:

    http://hackingonspace.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/getting-raw-voyager-data.html [blogspot.co.uk]
    http://hackingonspace.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/the-record-format-at-top-level-imq.html [blogspot.co.uk]
    http://hackingonspace.blogspot.co.uk/2014/11/decompressing-image.html [blogspot.co.uk]

  • (Score: 2) by bob_super on Monday August 21 2017, @07:17PM

    by bob_super (1357) on Monday August 21 2017, @07:17PM (#557183)

    > I'll just reuse this comment.

    If the Empire dominated the world using only about 40% of its current expenses, it would free about 330 000 000 000 dollars annually to fix US infrastructure, give you everything on your list, and still have some cash left over to reduce the debt.
    But we're afraid of something.