We hate to admit it, but whenever we see an article about either Voyager spacecraft, our thoughts immediately turn to worst-case scenarios. One of these days, we’ll be forced to write obituaries for the plucky interstellar travelers, but today is not that day, even with news of yet another issue aboard Voyager 1 that threatens its ability to communicate with Earth.
According to NASA, the current problem began on October 16 when controllers sent a command to turn on one of the spacecraft’s heaters. Voyager 1, nearly a light-day distant from Earth, failed to respond as expected 46 hours later. After some searching, controllers picked up the spacecraft’s X-band downlink signal but at a much lower power than expected. This indicated that the spacecraft had gone into fault protection mode, likely in response to the command to turn on the heater. A day later, Voyager 1 stopped communicating altogether, suggesting that further fault protection trips disabled the powerful X-band transmitter and switched to the lower-powered S-band downlink.
This was potentially mission-ending; the S-band downlink had last been used in 1981 when the probe was still well within the confines of the solar system, and the fear was that the Deep Space Network would not be able to find the weak signal. But find it they did, and on October 22 they sent a command to confirm S-band communications. At this point, controllers can still receive engineering data and command the craft, but it remains to be seen what can be done to restore full communications. They haven’t tried to turn the X-band transmitter back on yet, wisely preferring to further evaluate what caused the fault protection error that kicked this whole thing off before committing to a step like that.
Following Voyager news these days feels a little morbid, like a death watch on an aging celebrity. Here’s hoping that this story turns out to have a happy ending and that we can push the inevitable off for another few years. While we wait, if you want to know a little more about the Voyager comms system, we’ve got a deep dive that should get you going.
Thanks to [Mark Stevens] for the tip.
A certain old man from a well known British car show comes to mind.
Night rider?
clarkson’s farm has good reviews. it’s just the british paparazzi are a crowd of jackals that delight in writing derogatory hit pieces.
I worked with him once. He is a horrible human. Really.
I know someone who worked at a hotel the TG presenters used several times, the incident which ended his tenure on the show was not at all surprising.
Heheh I wouldn’t want him any other way. I know how people are who insist on saying “human” instead of “person” btw, people know how to pick up on that stuff a lot better nowadays
” whenever we see an article about either Voyager spacecraft, our thoughts immediately turn to worst-case scenarios.”
Not me. My thoughts are why are we still spending tax dollars, and time on this.
My thoughts are why are you here? on this site at all?
An excellent question, Peter
This. Like it is literally the spirit of Hackaday
Because it’s still doing science after nearly 50 years.
The tax dollar comment is silly. But, to put numbers on it. The cost will mostly be in people, so, team size. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia26275-voyager-team-celebrates-engineering-data-return/ here we see how many people are in the team, I count 18 people. According to glassdoor, JPL salaries range from $119K to $175K. So, to make math easy, say 18*175K, 3.15mil dollars per year. Assuming they work full time on just voyager (unlikely)
The NASA budget is $24875mil dollars. So, 0.0127% of the NASA budget goes to voyager at the WORST case. That to collect data from it’s 4 working instruments, to collect data that would be impossible to know in any other way. As it’s unique in many ways.
It’s unique because the gravity assists from all the planets required very specific planet alignment that doesn’t happen often. It’s not like we can quickly send a new probe to catch up to it.
As for time, that is something you could argue. Not the time of people (we have a lot of people here, with a lot of time). But we only have 1 deep space network, and it can generally only focus on 1 thing. No idea how time constrained that is. So there there might be an argument against it…
Well explained buddy!
It’s nevertheless like 18 people getting paid to watch a light bulb and wait for the filament to burn. While it’s not a big problem as such, it represents the general pointlessness of so many publicly funded projects that have dubious value in terms of science and development after the whole thing is down to just receiving technical telemetry.
Voyager 1 has (at least until this incident) four active instruments returning science data characterizing the interstellar medium… yes, just like a dying light bulb
@Mike: NASA doesn’t take a huge chunk of the Federal budget. Go look it up. If you want to improve the value we get for our taxes, look at the Defense budget, and the subsidies we pay to megacorps. And maybe we should put more Federal money into public education, because we need to encourage critical thinking and analysis of facts, as opposed to “just asking questions”.
Sure, we pay a lot of taxes and maybe the money isn’t being spent as well as it could be. Our elected representatives seem to be spending more time arguing and “investigating” the opposition than working together to get the most for our money. Perhaps fixing that would prove more valuable in the long run, than whining about money spent on NASA.
You lost me at ‘money into public education.’ As a victim of 12 years of wasted time, and this was up into the 1980s, where is the return? If education were done, people would have a heavily pro-liberty entrepreneurial limited government mindset. Some of the dumbest people I know have too much higher education.
Your message suggests a scenario: public education bootstrapped you to the point where you could read “Atlas Shrugged”, after which education ceased.
Better funding for public education would also help with the ‘dumbest people I know’ receiving the interventions they need, either to improve critical thinking or direction toward alternative educational goals like life skills. Some of the dumbest people I know got through primary/secondary schools by parents insisting that their child doesn’t need extra interventions
And the resources to find better solutions than using standardized tests as targets, rather than indicators of local needs.
My money is on @cmholm’s scenario for sure!
Offense masquerading as Defense. Defense would be much much cheaper. As for NASA, US should be proud of it.
The federal government has no legal business with education except military academies. Federally funding of, and therefor controlling, public schools is wrong because it allows the federal government to force its political beliefs onto every child. Funding and control of schools should be at the smallest level possible.
This leads immediately to the role of parents. In the U.S., parents put far too much trust in public schools and public school teachers. Every parent should be examining every textbook, every teacher, and every school policy in order to ensure the best education for their children. It’s not happening now.
Heh I have been advocating for my autistic but otherwise brilliant and sweet daughter for years now. Public education. It’s like playing racquet ball tween them and her with my face being the wall … years it sounds simple to do what you suggest, it seriously consumes a ton of your life while also having a second kid,full time uber stress job and being a widower
If someone does not wish for their child to take part in the public schooling system, they are free to send them to a private school or home-school them. The united states does have a legitimate interest in educating its populace, especially in a knowledge-based economy. Furthermore, while schools certainly can serve as an outlet for propaganda, the federal government has limited authority to specify what is taught. In particular, although teachers can ask students to examine different political beliefs, they are not supposed to advocate, in their capacity as a teacher, for any particular position.
Also, while I do acknowledge that there is benefit to having parents involved in public education, teachers have undergone a lot of schooling and study to figure out how to teach, and parents, by and large have not. So, unless there is reason to believe otherwise, parents can reasonably assume that teachers are doing their job. It is a good idea to spot check the school, but a thorough examination is unlikely to necessary unless you have some reasonable suspicion.
Deep Space Network current utilisation:
https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/dsn-now/dsn.html
Uhm, you don’t? The people involved in Voyager mission are badly paid, if at all.
To my understanding, they’re volunteer employees. Descendants of the original team members of some sort, I suppose.
The team nolonger is located at JPL, even, or so I read. Speaking under correction here.
NASA gets praises for free, though, for those people’s work.
It’s like advertising, public relations that cost nothing.
The statement I reply this to couldn’t have been more ignorant, I think. Bravo! 🥳👏🇺🇸
You might like this…
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia26275-voyager-team-celebrates-engineering-data-return/
Yeah, no.
The project leads for the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM) are (and always have been) at JPL. For the vast majority of VIM, that meant Ed Stone (who was also the director of JPL for a portion of it), who sadly passed away this year after stepping down in 2022. I was lucky enough to see him speak on Voyager several times since my fields overlap with the VIM’s primary science benefits (astroparticle physics).
Voyager’s current lead is Suzanne Dodd (who is also the project lead for the Spitzer Space Telescope, so yes, the poster above is correct), and no, neither her nor the others are volunteers, they’re all supported under various grants and also through the Voyager contract directly.
It isn’t actually hard to find out how much Voyager costs: this is a government project! They publish this stuff! Voyager’s costs for 2023+ are $5M/yr, and yes, the project itself is winding down (it was around 20-25% higher pre-2020).
Both spacecraft are still doing science, which you can read about in NASA’s congressional budget justification, which is published every year online. They are also very helpful for planning purposes in studies regarding long-term aging of spacecraft for extremely long duration missions.
The science they’re doing isn’t static, since one of the really nice things about being at the edge of interstellar space is that the Sun’s solar cycle changes things dramatically. There would be a lot of scientific value in keeping them going longer if we could!
What has always impressed me about NASA, is the amount of science they are able to do with broken equipment. Space Telescope, if you recall, was built with a bad mirror. No problem, we’ll send up the shuttle with a corrective lens…and they did. Now, even though Voyager is feeling its age, there are still scientists getting data from it. These folks just do. not. give. up.
Value for money. I grew up during Apollo. The boom in federal grants to schools was huge. Anything sciencey could get funding. Our school had a computer and a planetarium that they shared with surrounding schools. Think of the dividends that paid (I became an engineer) for this country by exposing the kids to the real-life science going on around them.
I just thought of this. I think NASA would find a use for a bent hairpin in LEO. Then there’s a Tesla in interplanetary space and as far as I know it isn’t collecting any data for science. They could have loaded the thing with student cubesats!
It’s not free to randomly launch things into space, even if the launch is: you need logistics and communication support, all of which cost money (and the cubesats themselves aren’t free either!). Plus it was launched into an unknown orbit, since the intent was to burn to empty, so there’s extremely little you could plan on doing with a payload.
This has come up so many times, I’m surprised NASA doesn’t have a page on it. NASA’s launched dummy payload simulators before, too. They just didn’t make a big show about it.
Thank you for your Information. In relation to other costs, I don’t think that costs for Voyager have any relevance, though. It’s peanuts (in terms of space exploration).
NASA has succesfully cut costs before when it had folded the Arecibo telescope project.
Their cost saving measures turned out to be very effective.
https://hackaday.com/tag/arecibo/
NASA budget as a percentage of total federal budget:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Budget_of_NASA
Not even 1%. Peaked during Apollo at 4%.
“My thoughts are why are we still spending tax dollars, and time on this.”
Because the United States is a democracy, and NASA submitted a well-justified budget request to elected representatives and it was reviewed and approved.
Which seems to be a better way to fund things than “ask the guy Mike on Hackaday what he thinks.”
The U.S. is a constitutional republic, not a democracy. This “science” benefits no taxpayer in any way. Taxation is theft, and especially when it’s frittered away on the pet projects of nerds, like this one.
If you don’t like it, you could always just not pay your taxes.
A libertarian who hates science, furthering the envelop of human achievement, education, AND the spirit of Hackaday itself by suggesting its not cool to keep old tech running? Brother i think you are on the wrong site. Reddit’s over there ->
I resent being called libertarian. I’m conservative. I don’t hate science or any of that other stuff. It’s just being done wrong.
“Taxation is theft”
Yeah, it’s the sort of theft that means I can have hospital treatment for an ingrowing toenail and not have to sell my house and declare bankrupcy.
X-acto knife and pliers. That’s a hack.
It’s not simple. Theft is the taking of property from its rightful owner without permission. That describes taxation perfectly. The relevant and valid question is, “Is the money taken by taxation used to prevent a violation of rights worse than taxation (including the violation of the principle of private property) ?” The protection of lives from aggressors, foreign and domestic, qualifies. Your toenail does not.
“It’s not simple. Theft is the taking of property from its rightful owner without permission. That describes taxation perfectly. The relevant and valid question is, “Is the money taken by taxation used to prevent a violation of rights worse than taxation (including the violation of the principle of private property) ?” The protection of lives from aggressors, foreign and domestic, qualifies. Your toenail does not.”
And I thought that money was state property. Like a driver’s license or an ID card.
I made this assumption because destroying money is illegal.
Citizens do not “own” it, it is merely in their possession for a temporarily moment.
But perhaps that is only the case in my country, which, by the way, has “Federal Republic” in its name. 🙂
Money itself is, but the work and economic value it represents is not. If the government wants its money back, it should re-compensate it with something of equal value. The question then becomes, are your tax dollars returned to you at equal value, or do you get short-changed when the money goes to other people instead?
The phrase “democratic republic” was created in the 1700s because “democracy” had a bad connotation from Ancient Greece. That connotation no longer exists, so it’s a pointless distinction. They’re the same thing.
If you doubt me on that, read the writings of the people at the time, or virtually any decent historian.
Well, there is a difference. An important one. The Constitution. Protection of individual rights makes it a republic rather than a straight democracy (rule by majority) . Also a reason we have the electoral college, so that the most populous states (like Kaliforia) can’t have absolute control the elections. That’s a good thing BTW. We are a republic.
https://www.diffen.com/difference/Democracy_vs_Republic
A republic is a type of government that has legislative and executive officers selected directly or indirectly by the vote of eligible citizens; the wider the voter base, the more democratic it is. It is never correct to equate a democracy with with a democratic republic, it is sometimes correct to equate a republic with a democratic republic.
A long list of qualifiers is necessary to identify the design of the government of the United States of America. It is a constitutional democratic republic with defined rights, separation of powers, checks and balances — and a few other things that escape me at this moment.
Sooo…taxation is theft. How would you propose we pay for roads and infrastructure like sewers and water? The free market? Pay as you go? I think we know where that would end up — high tolls and no maintenance, while the companies that own the roads shrug their shoulders and sail off in their yachts, upping the tolls as they leave.
Gonna be a big problem when the companies that want no environmental regulations meet up with the companies that sell clean drinking water, and you just know who’s going to get the sht end of *that stick.
The fact that taxation is theft does not mean that the government should not engage in theft in a precisely defined manner that does minimum damage.
A book has been written describing how roads can be privately owned and operated. I have a copy. If you’re willing to learn, go find it for yourself.
I used to live in a gated community of about 100 houses (the gates were never closed). The community owned the roads; property owners paid dues to maintain them and had to agree to the community’s rules to buy a house therein. Highways can run on reasonable tolls; in principle the Merritt Parkway could compete with the Connecticut Throughway and for a while they did, kinda, although they were both owned by the state.
Highways in Norway are constructed by the government, but set up as toll roads, so the public pays the cost up front but gets the money back from the tolls from the people who actually use the road. In that way, the government “borrows” money from the taxpayers and then pays them back by not increasing the taxes to pay for the road. That however requires that the government has at least some money in reserve, rather than running on constant deficit and debt; printing more money is also taxation through inflation. Public projects that are “free for all” simply end up privatizing the profits and socializing the cost.
The larger public projects in the US used to be like that as well up until the New Deal, because the sentiment was that the federal government doesn’t have the right to interfere with the economy at large and use the greater public to pay for projects that benefit only some of it. Big public projects were funded by borrowing from the public (selling bonds etc.) and then paying back with the revenues from the project.
Yeah we could buy 0.00002% more corn meal and canola oil for Lagos with that valuable money!!! What a waste! Let’s turn our faces into the dirt, that’s by far the most practical option
Do you really know how little is spent on this ? It’s tiny budget, I believe about 0.3% for ALL of NASA, so imagine how tiny the deep space network costs out of that, while still serving many other missions. Do the research before assuming its cost. It’s minuscule. It’s worth every micro cent dude https://fiscaldata.treasury.gov/americas-finance-guide/federal-spending/
Hey, you’re be paying them all pensions anyway, at least they aren’t tearing up the streets terrorising the youth on their mobility scooters.
Because this is money well spend on furthering humanities knowledge.
So what would you spend that 5 million a year on, Mike?
1600 155 millimeter artillery shells?
42 Stinger missiles?
2.5 Tomahawk cruise missiles?
4 inmate executions in Kansas?
1 million school lunches (out of 5 billion a year served in the USA)?
There you go, the new challenge is to build better antennas, maybe in space.
That the space probe has returned as a hyper-power computer-ship inside a nebula and is searching for answers about it’s creation and the meaning of life!
Some might call that a best-case scenario :).
Here is an interesting document they have provided…
https://descanso.jpl.nasa.gov/DPSummary/Descanso4–Voyager_new.pdf
This is good stuff
So cool the probes are still sending data. Tax money well spent. Should be sending more ‘out there’ . When man stops exploring, stagnation sets in…. Like war (unfortunately) kick starts innovations, so does exploring the unknown….
It would be really amazing to get detailed documentation of the OS and software design on these. The ability to work around seemingly arbitrary failures that would be fatal in any other embedded system has to stem from some interesting techniques.
Here is some information (a start) : https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-anniversary-computers-command-data-attitude-control/
At one point, NASA’s website had specs listed for their various probes–memory, storage, processor capabilities, power sources and capacity, instruments and spacecraft features. It was fascinating reading to see how much was done with the hardware. It also gave the ability to compare their hardware with terrestrial offerings.
Last saw it 15-20 years ago. I would love to find an updated version of that page.
Part of the reason how it became so flexible may be the cost-cutting needed and the limitations of hardware at the time. They just couldn’t put enough memory to handle the control and measurement sequences required for the multiple flybys of the Voyager missions, so in-flight reprogrammability was required even if everything went according to plan.
But I bet that after Apollo 13, they very well understood how important flexibility is for coping with inevitable surprises.
Akin’s Laws Of Spacecraft Design #2: “To design a spacecraft right takes an infinite amount of effort. This is why it’s a good idea to design them to operate when some things are wrong.”
I was just thinking what they could do with a space hardened, say, RP2350 board(s). Small enough form factor to easily have say 5 or more redundant SOCs for ‘main’ controller…. low power and small enough to even incase in lead (or whatever used now) for radiation protection without adding excessive weight.
Seems like a good time to roll out an advanced (today’s tech) Voyager 3 and 4 :) . They could easily be same size or smaller with better nuclear power supplies…. With heavy lift rockets available, it seems you could possible ditch some of the gravity assist fly-bys to send beyond our solar system… Or even re-fuel in orbit and then accelerate the little probes on out. Expensive probably but may be worth it to get years and years of better science data (like web vs hubble tech…) …. An engineering ‘challenge’ :) .
I agree. While New Horizons is an impressive probe but I’d like to see a Dawn probe with a 4000 liter propellant tank, long life ion drive and RTG power. Continuous thrusting and some very high speed gravity assists could overtake all of them, deliver much newer instruments to interstellar space and do some interesting science on the way.