Probing Thoughts In Space

That wasn't as clever a title as I thought it would be. This article is about Voyager 1. Kinda. It's a space probe. See?

Image generated by ChatGPT with dall-e-3. The full prompt is after the article.

Let's talk about something that's not the eclipse. That seems to be the main topic of discussion at the moment and I'm bored with it. This may have a little to do with the fact that, though I live in the so-called "zone of totality" it was so cloudy that I didn't see it. It got dark. It got light again. Yay¹.

There are other interesting things going on. Have you heard what's happening with Voyager 1? Do you remember what Voyager 1 is? Voyager 1 (and it's sister, Voyager 2) is a space probe NASA sent out into the solar system in the late 70s. It has flown by Jupiter and Saturn and sent back fantastic pictures. It has taken readings of the different regions of the solar system and sent them back, too.

What? What do I mean by "regions" of the solar system?

Without going into a full blown astronomy lesson - which would require me to do some reading first - space isn't really empty. There's more to the solar system than just some planets the planets we here about. There's the asteroid belt, mostly in between Mars and Jupiter. And there's the Oort Cloud and the Kuiper Belt, both of which are way out there beyond the planets. And there's radiation. Lots and lots of radiation. I don't mean light, which, you know, radiates from the Sun. I mean the hard stuff, like is given off by nuclear fusion and then accelerated by magnetic fields so it has very high energy. The Sun pretty much blasts the whole solar system with radiation. We're protected from it by the Earth's magnetic field and the atmosphere. Nice things to have, huh?

There's lots of radiation from the rest of the galaxy, too. LOTS. Usually, we're protected from most of that by the radiation from the Sun. Think of two people with hoses pointing them at each other but each stream hits the other stream and it splashes all over the place but keeps the streams from directly hitting the people holding the hoses. It's not really anything like that but it was a fun metaphor to try.

Back in 2012, Voyager 1 passed a region called the heliopause. That's the spot where the Solar Radiation stops (sort of) and the Cosmic Radiation from everywhere else takes over². At that point. Voyager 1 was officially outside the solar system. That is one of the greatest things the human race has ever achieved. It's greater than the pyramids. Greater than figuring out the structure of DNA. It's nearly as great as the invention of lasagna.

Well, maybe not quite that great. But it's pretty good.

Toward the end of last year, November I think, the data feed from Voyager 1 turned to gibberish. Voyager has had problems once in a while, sure. Who wouldn't after nearly a half century of travel? The biggest one is that it's power source is running down. They've been slowly shutting down systems to conserve power. Think about the marvel of that sentence. People here on Earth are able to send commands to a piece of equipment made 47 years ago and have it follow them, to conserve the power supply that is still running after all that time³.

If someone tried to make a thing like that today, I doubt they would even be able to find it 47 years from now. If it sent any data back at all, it would be a Blue Screen of Death. The vendor who developed the software would happily troubleshoot it for only a whopping big extra fee. And then they'd just want to wipe the hard drive and upgrade the OS⁴.

Anyway, last month they were able to send Voyager 1 a command that basically made it dump memory so they could troubleshoot it the old fashioned way. The tedious way that makes your eyes cross and your head ache. It took a bit but they figured out that it's having a hardware problem. A chip went bad. Who would have thought that a chip would go bad after only 47 years of being bathed in hard radiation? I'd complain to somebody about that if I were them.

Is anyone surprised that I might roll my eyes at the thought of comparing technology with the staying power of Voyager 1 to the stuff that gets put out today? Would you want the next probe to be made by Tesla? Or Boeing?

Here's an interesting little tidbit about the Voyager computers. When they built them, the desktop computer hadn't yet been invented. Or maybe it was invented but they hadn't started to sell them commercially yet. I'm not going to bother checking. Software changed when anyone could write and run software locally. Back in the days of Voyager, no programmer ever said, "What do you mean it doesn't work? It runs fine on my system!"

The way software was written back then involved lots of up front planning. I mean, YEARS worth of planning for a complex system. These days we call that style "waterfall" and everyone agrees that it's old fashioned and doesn't even work. What we do now is more like:

Manager: "Do you think you can write code to do this?" (Shows feature description written in crayon on the back of a bar napkin)

Developer: "Probably. Give me a few hours to see if I can make a proof of concept."

And as often as not, in a few hours you have a sort of working demo that proves the concept is probably possible. A month or three later, you roll it out to customers and hope they like it. You raise money off of it whether they do or not, though, thinking that you can always fix whatever problems might come up.

I tell software stories because I don't know from hardware. I spent all those decades programming for a living. Not welding or something. If I had, this article might be about Boeing instead of Voyager 1.

It just ain't the same.

Anyway, the folks at NASA are saying there's a workaround they're going to try to get Voyager to send good data again⁵. I hope it works out. I hope Tesla trucks and Boeing 737s work out too. I have a lot more hope for the old style tech, way out there in space, though.

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Here's the prompt: "Imagine a more dynamic and humorous version of the Voyager 1 spacecraft, personified with a human-like face, complete with wide, expressive eyes covered by a comical, oversized blindfold. This character is depicted in a pose that suggests rapid, slightly uncontrolled motion, embodying the concept of hurtling through the vast, star-studded expanse of deep space. The background is a blur of stars and colorful nebulae, enhancing the sense of speed and movement. Voyager 1's antennas and instruments are exaggerated in size for comedic effect, flailing as if trying to maintain balance or direction in the vastness of space. The overall scene is whimsical, capturing the boldness of space exploration with a light-hearted, adventurous spirit."

1. To be fair, it was pretty cool, even if we couldn't see the Sun itself. But it's over now and time to try a different topic.

2. The point where the water from the two hoses meet, except that would be called a hydropause. Same concept, more or less.

3. It’s radioactive. Funny thing about radiation. After a while, it all radiates away.

4. Do I sound bitter? I don't mean to sound bitter. After all, I had backups when the people at the manufacturer decided to wipe my laptop and send it back without fixing the problem. So it's not like I lost much, right?

5. Engineers Pinpoint Cause of Voyager 1 Issue, Are Working on Solution.