"The people that built the spacecraft are not alive anymore," Dodd said. "We do have a reasonably good set of documentation, but a lot of it is in paper, so you do this archaeology dig to get documents."

Honestly this sounds a bit like negligence. It should be relatively easy to digitize everything and create a complete virtual simulation of the electronics including power levels and thermals so you can easily test the transmissions and programs before sending them.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago (1 children)

That is a REALLY shit excuse for any good software engineer. If you can't read well written paper documents then what the fuck are you doing with your life? Just imagine it's a man page printed out

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago (1 children)

My point is that if there is "only paper" then there is no digital representation, meaning there is no emulation. Right?

That means you're sending a program in machine code outside the solar system without having tested it before. And the people who build this thing are not among us anymore to answer any idiosyncrasies of the hardware / software. If you had a simulation so you can test and minimize the risk to this treasure.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 10 months ago (2 children)

But if you have all the schematics, there's really no reason not to have a digital simulation. I mean, we've had emulated analog synthesizers in pro audio apps for at least a decade. Surely NASA could do this by now.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 10 months ago

Yeah. Except time and money. Or maybe the simulation would be too inaccurate and only give a false sense of safety? That's the only reason I can think of why not to do this.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

That's all good in theory. However, the RAM on Voyager 1 is an analogue tape recorder, so it will eventually just stop working.

The computer(s) onboard is also the computer-system made by mankind that has been turned "on" for the longest time of any computer. It has never been turned off since the launch in 1977. There's no other computer on Earth that has managed to run consistently for anywhere that long, and frankly I'm unsure if we even could. Theoretically it should be easy, but in practice... I doubt it. Most traffic signs need calibration annually or more frequent.. This thing has been flying through space for 46 years and carrying out Fortran commands every day and now it just doesn't. If there's any physical problems... It's impossible to revive.