Updates Voyager mission news

[orb]

The Planetary Society Blog: Voyager: A Tribute

 

[NukeET]

The Planetary Society Blog: Voyager: A Tribute

IMHO, the best tribute was a quote from the above link:

"You only explore the solar system for the first time once," Larry Soderblom, one of the mission's two geologists noted. "Voyager did that."

 

[Soheil_Esy]

From Deep Space to SoundCloud: NASA Uploads 1970s Alien Podcast

28.07.2015

NASA's Golden Record was carried onboard the spacecraft Voyager One and Two in the 1970s, so that aliens could hear greetings in Earth's languages, and sounds thought to represent life on Earth.

The 'Golden Record' sound recordings which were taken aboard the Voyager space probe missions in the 1970s were uploaded by NASA on Monday to SoundCloud, the popular online audio sharing service, giving humans a chance to listen to the sounds originally intended only for alien ears.

The recording comprises greetings in 55 languages, and 19 recordings of 'Sounds of Earth,' including a tractor, Morse code, a chimpanzee and 'the first tools.'

The sounds were included on the Golden Record, a kind of time capsule which hopes to convey life on Earth to extraterrestrials which might meet with Voyager. As well as the sounds, the record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk, contains a 90 minute mixtape of music and 115 images of life on Earth.

The Golden Record is carried onboard both the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which launched in 1977 and still returns communication to the Deep Space Network from around 12 billion miles away.

In September 2013 NASA announced that Voyager 1 is the first human-made object to officially venture into interstellar space, having been traveling for about one year in a transitional region of plasma, in the space between stars.

The last instruments on Voyager will run out of power in 2025, long before Voyager gets close enough, in 40,000 years, to approach any other planetary system, so it's up to the extraterrestrials of the future whether they want to let Earth know they got the message.

"The spacecraft will be encountered and the record played only if there are advanced spacefaring civilizations in interstellar space," said Carl Sagan, who chaired the committee which selected the content for the Golden Record.

"But the launching of this bottle into the cosmic ocean says something very hopeful about life on this planet."


http://sputniknews.com/science/20150728/1025142702.html


Soundcloud
https://soundcloud.com/nasa/sets/golden-record-greetings-to-the

 

[Ripley]

Sorry for necroposting, but this is juicy:
Voyager 40th anniversary: The Planetary Report's chronicles

...In honor of the 40th anniversary of the Voyager missions, we're making publicly available seven back issues of The Planetary Report, featuring writing from Planetary Society founder Carl Sagan...

 

[GLS]

The Voyager Bulletin published by JPL during the mission is also a very good read. It's available here: http://www.planetary.org/explore/resource-library/voyager-mission-status.html

 

[Nicholas Kang]

And she is alive!

NASA: Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years

Voyager 1, NASA's farthest and fastest spacecraft, is the only human-made object in interstellar space, the environment between the stars. The spacecraft, which has been flying for 40 years, relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth. These thrusters fire in tiny pulses, or "puffs," lasting mere milliseconds, to subtly rotate the spacecraft so that its antenna points at our planet. Now, the Voyager team is able to use a set of four backup thrusters, dormant since 1980.

"With these thrusters that are still functional after 37 years without use, we will be able to extend the life of the Voyager 1 spacecraft by two to three years," said Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.

Since 2014, engineers have noticed that the thrusters Voyager 1 has been using to orient the spacecraft, called "attitude control thrusters," have been degrading. Over time, the thrusters require more puffs to give off the same amount of energy. At 13 billion miles from Earth, there's no mechanic shop nearby to get a tune-up.

The Voyager team assembled a group of propulsion experts at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California, to study the problem. Chris Jones, Robert Shotwell, Carl Guernsey and Todd Barber analyzed options and predicted how the spacecraft would respond in different scenarios. They agreed on an unusual solution: Try giving the job of orientation to a set of thrusters that had been asleep for 37 years.

“The Voyager flight team dug up decades-old data and examined the software that was coded in an outdated assembler language, to make sure we could safely test the thrusters," said Jones, chief engineer at JPL.

In the early days of the mission, Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter, Saturn, and important moons of each. To accurately fly by and point the spacecraft's instruments at a smorgasbord of targets, engineers used "trajectory correction maneuver,” or TCM, thrusters that are identical in size and functionality to the attitude control thrusters, and are located on the back side of the spacecraft. But because Voyager 1's last planetary encounter was Saturn, the Voyager team hadn't needed to use the TCM thrusters since November 8, 1980. Back then, the TCM thrusters were used in a more continuous firing mode; they had never been used in the brief bursts necessary to orient the spacecraft.

All of Voyager's thrusters were developed by Aerojet Rocketdyne. The same kind of thruster, called the MR-103, flew on other NASA spacecraft as well, such as Cassini and Dawn.

On Tuesday, Nov. 28, 2017, Voyager engineers fired up the four TCM thrusters for the first time in 37 years and tested their ability to orient the spacecraft using 10-millisecond pulses. The team waited eagerly as the test results traveled through space, taking 19 hours and 35 minutes to reach an antenna in Goldstone, California, that is part of NASA's Deep Space Network.

Lo and behold, on Wednesday, Nov. 29, they learned the TCM thrusters worked perfectly -- and just as well as the attitude control thrusters.

“The Voyager team got more excited each time with each milestone in the thruster test. The mood was one of relief, joy and incredulity after witnessing these well-rested thrusters pick up the baton as if no time had passed at all," said Barber, a JPL propulsion engineer.

The plan going forward is to switch to the TCM thrusters in January. To make the change, Voyager has to turn on one heater per thruster, which requires power -- a limited resource for the aging mission. When there is no longer enough power to operate the heaters, the team will switch back to the attitude control thrusters.

The thruster test went so well, the team will likely do a similar test on the TCM thrusters for Voyager 2, the twin spacecraft of Voyager 1. The attitude control thrusters currently used for Voyager 2 are not yet as degraded as Voyager 1's, however.

 

[Keatah]

Does anyone know offhand the current estimated remaining mission time for V1 and V2?

 

[Andy44]

Gotta love V'ger!

 

[GLS]

Not news, but 2 images I found in Wikipedia that show the path of the Voyagers as seen from Earth.

BTW: should we have a "Spaceflight Image Thread"?

 

[Keatah]

No wonder they needed to use the backup thrusters! With all that spinning Voyager 1 is doing..

And why did Voyager 2 get almost all the way to Saturn and then backtrack to Venus? Now we know why it takes so long to get anywhere!

 

[Andy44]

Wow, you can really see the dramatic plane change of Voyager 2's trajectory there!

 

[GLS]

Wow, you can really see the dramatic plane change of Voyager 2's trajectory there!

Voyager 1 went "up" at Saturn to get to Titan, and Voyager 2 went "down" at Neptune (it flew right over the North pole there) to get to Triton.

FYI: "getting there" means not only a close fly-by, but also a trajectory such that the spacecraft gets both a Sun occultation and an Earth occultation.

 

[Notebook]

Nasa's Voyager 2 probe 'leaves the Solar System'

The Voyager 2 probe, which left Earth in 1977, has become the second human-made object to leave our Solar System.
It was launched 16 days before its twin craft, Voyager 1, but that probe's faster trajectory meant that it was in "the space between the stars" six years before Voyager 2.
The news was revealed at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) meeting in Washington.
And chief scientist on the mission, Prof Edward Stone, confirmed it.

https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/science-environment-46502820

 

[Keatah]

How many times have the Voyagers left the Solar System previously?

 

[GLS]

How many times have the Voyagers left the Solar System previously?

That depends on what is the "Solar System"... :shifty:
Good point-of-view here:
[ame="https://twitter.com/DrPhiltill/status/1072129327167430658"]https://twitter.com/DrPhiltill/status/1072129327167430658[/ame]

 

[GLS]

Voyager 2 was launched 46 years ago!


Interesting video about the CGI views of the probes encounters:

 

[TheShuttleExperience]

 

[GLS]

NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth​

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth

After some inventive sleuthing, the mission team can — for the first time in five months — check the health and status of the most distant human-made object in existence.

For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars).
Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed that the issue was tied to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth.
The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.
So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.
The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.
During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.
Voyager 2 continues to operate normally. Launched over 46 years ago, the twin Voyager spacecraft are the longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history. Before the start of their interstellar exploration, both probes flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune.

 

[Urwumpe]

Really great news! This probe really has nine lives like a cat.

This software restructuring was really not that easy as it might sound at first: In such machine-language-heavy projects, you often had multiple different entry points into a function, so the same code can perform multiple different tasks depending on which place in the code you jump to for beginning the execution. And of course, this means you have to move larger blocks of code as one and often need to identify all calls to the same function.

Such functions are more rare today as "life is too short to learn assembly language" , but still exist in embedded software, computing kernels, shaders and drivers. And of course, the operating system of the space shuttle had a bunch of those functions, too. especially among the IOP programs.

 

[Arvil]

It’s weird to think that the spacecraft is older than some of those who are working on this project. Younger ones may have had learn code no longer taught.