21 votes

NASA brings Voyager 2 fully back online, 11.5 billion miles from Earth

4 comments

  1. [4]
    Omnicrola
    Link
    The feat of engineering that the Voyager craft represents is just incredible to me. We built a pair of devices that have functioned for almost half a century with zero physical maintenance in the...

    The feat of engineering that the Voyager craft represents is just incredible to me. We built a pair of devices that have functioned for almost half a century with zero physical maintenance in the incredibly harsh environment of outer space. They continue to provide new and valuable data about our universe, in a society that discards their old phone once every few years.

    It's also very disheartening to think of what we could have achieved as a nation (US) and as a world of we put even a fraction of the resources into science that we have into military assets over the last 50 years.

    15 votes
    1. [2]
      balooga
      Link Parent
      I couldn’t have said it better myself. I’m a web software engineer and the stuff I work on is barely stable, spaghetti code held together by duct tape and a prayer. When I heard Voyager 2 went...

      I couldn’t have said it better myself. I’m a web software engineer and the stuff I work on is barely stable, spaghetti code held together by duct tape and a prayer. When I heard Voyager 2 went down I was sure it would be permanent. That they managed to reactivate it is astonishing.

      6 votes
      1. Omnicrola
        Link Parent
        I'm also a developer, I've worked on a range of things from medical devices to web apps to databases. People generally know that higher quality software means more effort, but I think it's widely...

        I'm also a developer, I've worked on a range of things from medical devices to web apps to databases. People generally know that higher quality software means more effort, but I think it's widely underestimated even by developer teams just how much time is involved in making something truly robust. And honestly it doesn't always make sense to make things really robust, but I think our current level of tolerance is way too low.

        2 votes
    2. mat
      Link Parent
      It might have been via tildes that I originally saw this link, but check out Uptime 15,364 days - The Computers of Voyager for some background on how the Voyager computers work, it's amazing.

      It might have been via tildes that I originally saw this link, but check out Uptime 15,364 days - The Computers of Voyager for some background on how the Voyager computers work, it's amazing.

      5 votes