Crazy to think how much time has passed since that flyby.
Also, one of the program managers was on The Moth podcast describing the panic when new Horizons rebooted days before the flyby.
NASA's New Horizons spacecraft launched on January 19, 2006, and performed its historic flyby of Pluto on July 14, 2015. This journey took 3,463 days (approximately 9.5 years).
3,932 days July 14, 2015–April 19, 2026
Even if we launch a new deep space probe as best we can they're gonna be real slow?
You can use the sun as a gravitational lens: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_gravitational_lens
You need to be about 550 au out.
Deep space itself - that's what the Voyagers are measuring.
Next think about what effort we have done to send a galactic hello. We don't have any deep space probes sent off in the universe constantly sending a hello message. So if all we did was fire a hello message away from earth for 24 hours what are the odds that some alien life picked it up verses they had that day off and missed our signal.
I think this is a much more plausible explanation to the Fermi paradox. If we want to do our part to prove it wrong we need to begin sending a universe hello from earth transmission and run it for not years, not decades, not centuries but from now and for the rest of humanity. Hopefully some other alien civilization has realized the same and they too begin sending a continuous transmission we might get lucky and pick up.
Both assume that there _is_ some other life, but that it's hard to reach. We don't know if there is anything else.
Earth could be completely unique in the existence, even with all the endless multiuniverses. Mathematical propabilities are not proof that there _must be_ life somewhere else. The answer could just as well be '0'. Only life that was, is and will ever be. When we are eventually gone, that's it. No more life.
edit: sorry about the negativity in my reply; just pondering out loud :D
When they talk about rerouting power and performing a "big bang" reconfiguration with a 23 hour lag on equipment that was underpowered when the 8088 came out... it kind of melts my brain.
Apparently it still has ten years worth of fuel left!
Most microcontrollers can update their own flash while running, either with a built-in bootloader or a user-programmed bootloader that takes up a little bit of the flash.
What makes you think that Voyager isn't "rebooted" though?
So you copy a small write routine into RAM, copy a chunk of new data there too, jump to the routine, then it returns to your main bootloader in flash which receives the next chunk from a UART or whatever (because of course it doesn’t fit into RAM all at once), rinse and repeat. You aren’t exactly going to be serving realtime interrupts during this.
(So if you do need minimal downtime, you probably have dual external flash chips, or even just two microcontrollers given execute-from-external-flash would bump you up to fancy micros.)
I think it wasn't intended.
Generally we don’t construct and maintain expensive scientific equipment just for the fun of it. There usually is some question or debate we expect them to answer or settle.
It's amazing not only are the electrical components still operational, but some mechanical ones as well.
Unlike the non human-made craft in the region?
Closing in on one light day!
> The team will implement the Big Bang on Voyager 2 first, which has a little more power to spare and is closer to Earth, making it the safer test subject. Tests are planned for May and June 2026. If they go well, the team will attempt the same fix on Voyager 1 no sooner than July. If it works, there is even a chance that Voyager 1’s LECP could be switched back on.
Voyager 1 has only a year left otherwise? Also, what low-powered alternatives are there? Is there that much redundancy? I'd love to know what their idea and plan are?
Also,
> For Voyager 1, the LECP was next on that list. The team shut off the LECP on Voyager 2 in March 2025.
Why? Voyager 2 has more power to spare, per the prior quote.
Because Voyager 2 has different equipment active. It still has the Cosmic Ray Subsystem active.
Because it’s unnecessary.
It’s not a difficult skill.
When folks are in that situation, they tend to adapt quickly to their reality. But that’s not the reality for the vast majority of developers today.
Thankfully.
I spent about 6 months teaching myself how to tie a set of useful knots, and the reality is by now I can't do most of them anymore because day to day it turns out I just never need to tie a Midshipmen's knot (it's super useful when the siruation arises..which is rarely for an IT worker).
It is annoying to find out that your job failed to run or exited immediately due to a typo or other minor mistake.
Of course ML training (and scientific computing) jobs can take weeks or months to complete. Checkpoint and restart features are important because node or other failures are almost inevitable.
That's it. Nothing to do with speed. We could launch something that goes way faster right now, if someone wanted to pay for it. Hell, we could have done it 50 years ago.
We didn't because it would go in a straight line towards "nothing".