This was so exciting to read. Especially to learn that Voyager should be good for another 12 years at least - surely comfortably into interstellar space by then, with the little blue dot invisibly small. Trin Tragula was right, and it's great that the Voyagers are helping prove it.
Voyager ticks one box for interstellar arrival
The venerable Voyager 1 spacecraft seems to be a little closer to leaving our Sun's neighbourhood behind and entering interstellar space, says NASA. The space agency has outlined three criteria that must be satisfied before Voyager will be deemed to have left the heliosphere, the first of which is detection of galactic cosmic …
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Monday 18th June 2012 01:58 GMT Herby
Consider this...
The spacecraft were launched in 1977, 35 years ago. It was probably designed a few years before that as well (microprocessors were a little primitive in that era). If I remember correctly, the Voyager spacecraft didn't have much of a micro to speak of anyway. So, does anyone out there have a computer from that era that is in working order?
Oh, and the speed of 7200 bps was pretty fast in that era, and consider the distance the data travels, it is a few km/miles between us and the spacecraft is only a few watts of power in its transmitter.
Quite an accomplishment if you ask me!
MJS77 lives!
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Monday 18th June 2012 02:24 GMT Quantum Leaper
I have a computer (DEC something with 8 inch disks) from the late 70s the turns on but doesn't work correctly since I don't have a working boot disk. I have a number of game consoles from the 70s, a Fairchild Channel F, a couple Atari 2600s, a Atari Pong (only 2 of 4 paddles) and a Coleco Combat, all still work good. So hardware that old still works, if you take care of it. I have other old electronic stuff that still works, but they are mainly toys.
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Monday 18th June 2012 02:45 GMT Martin Huizing
"so we're pretty sure there's a few packets dropped along the way"
And you don't think these space boffins integrated ECC (Error Check and Correct) technology in the data stream?
Still all in all amazing these little machines are still going and I hope the data received will help to develop better space exploring technologies. God Speed!
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Monday 18th June 2012 11:58 GMT Anonymous Coward
Voyager error correction
Actually Voyage was launched with the concatenated convolution & Reed-Solomon error correction system that was not, at the time, tried and tested but the engineers expected it to deliver better performance than the then-standard long constraint length convolution codes.
It is implemented on dedicated hardware, with the choice of the dual-basis (Berlekamp) RS representation made to simplify the hardware design (in a software encoder or decoder it need an additional, though trivial, look-up transformation).
And it did work, becoming the de-facto FEC system for most space use until the rise of Turbo codes in the last decade, which provide only an extra 1-2dB of performance.
An impressive achievement!
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Monday 18th June 2012 12:17 GMT Armando 123
Re: Here's to humanity in general
Fair point; I'd love to see us build more Voyagers and space probes. However, keep in mind that because the commercial launches make the technologies more affordable, they should make planetary and trans-planetary probes MORE affordable. Of course, all governments are governments OF the bureaucrat, BY the ureaucrate, FOR the bureaucrat; which means they care more about currying votes by ... Sorry, I'll put my libertarianism back; don't know how it got out.
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Monday 18th June 2012 03:43 GMT Anonymous Coward
Good work V1 / V2
The day will arrive soon, that our wee space probe that's travelled further than any man made object in existence will arrive at the edge of our great solar system, it will be ready to take on the new challenges that await it outside and keep on providing us with once in a life time data on what goes on out there.......
and just as its about to pass the threshold,,,,,,,,,
BANG
it puts a hole in a giant sphere covered in what looks like LCD panels and a booming voice lets you know that your entire existence is nothing be a reality TV show.
hehe :)
The wonderful thing about this and our existence for that matter.......
Prove me wrong! ;)
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Monday 18th June 2012 04:32 GMT Captain Save-a-ho
Re: Good work V1 / V2
Challenge accepted.
1. The heliosphere that represents this mythical threshold isn't a giant sphere at all, but is really more of an ovoid.
2. There would be no booming voice, as sound cannot travel in a vacuum.
And, there's always the Chewbacca defense.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chewbacca_defense
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Monday 18th June 2012 16:30 GMT Nigel 11
Head nowhere near hurting
It's less than a light-day out. Great engineering, but ...
The nearest star is about four light-YEARS away.
Our galaxy is amout 120,000 light-years across and contains around 400 BILLION stars.
The observable universe is tens of billions of light-years across and contains more GALAXIES than our galaxy contains stars.
Head hurting yet?
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Monday 18th June 2012 05:38 GMT A Non e-mouse
Interesting Background Reading
The Wikipedia entries on the Voyager (and Pioneer) missions make interesting reading. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_program Is a good starting point.
For those who are amazed at 70s technology still working, add this to the mix: Space is not friendly to electronics. It's darn cold out there, and there's an awful lot of cosmic radiation out there.
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Monday 18th June 2012 07:36 GMT a_mu
hats off to the engineers
an amazing bit of what we used to be able to do stuff.
how many computers of today will work in 40 years time ?
with my managers hat on, these are failures,
they were obviously over engineered, lasting much longer than they are intended to
cost way more than they could have , and stopping us selling new / better toys
or have I that wrong some where ?
:-> ..
How we used to be able to make stuff that did a great engineering job,
amazing.
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Tuesday 19th June 2012 07:44 GMT Anonymous Coward
Just think what we could have achieved if we'd not spent all that time and effort discovering new and more horrific ways to kill each other and instead got on with doing things that would benefit us all.
Politicians waving their dicks around are almost as bad as religion at holding back humanity.
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Monday 18th June 2012 11:11 GMT Marek
Re: We should be sending more.
Couldn't agree more. We should be thinking ahead... a long way ahead. Send out something now with all it's power and systems optimised for sending back data for as long as possible from as far as possible. They'll be thanking us for it in the future the same way we're thanking those engineers in 70s.
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Monday 18th June 2012 09:54 GMT Mine's a pint
Voyager data integrity
In the early 80s I was on a CD player maintenance course and was told that the forward error correction used to make them damage resistant was Reed-Solomon coding, developed in 1960 and used for Voyager communication. It is still in use for DVD and QR codes amongst many others.
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Monday 18th June 2012 11:56 GMT Simon Harris
7.2 kbps ?
Wondering where that figure came from..
'Uplink communications is via S-band (16-bits/sec command rate) while an X-band transmitter provides downlink telemetry at 160 bits/sec normally and 1.4 kbps for playback of high-rate plasma wave data. All data are transmitted from and received at the spacecraft via the 3.7 meter high-gain antenna (HGA). '