Started watching after your comment.. Fantastic documentary! And its great to see some shots of the screens they use to manage the probes and stuff. And yes, some ninjas cutting onions..
... I found it a bit poignant / emotional as well! ... those engineers in a dusty office beside McDonalds... quietly keeping the mission going... in touch with something that's beyond our solar system now... True engineers! No glitz... quiet dedication...
> [The S-band] uses a different frequency than the X-band transmitters signal is significantly fainter. The flight team was not certain the S-band could be detected at Earth due to the spacecraft’s distance, but [it turned out to work]
This is the most fascinating part to me. Isn't it well-established how sensitive a signal we can hear? Did they implement something like a new signal analysis method that enabled it?
And it says this wasn't used or even tried since the 80s anymore, I guess it grew too faint. Looking up the frequencies, X is 8–12 GHz and S is 2–4. Doesn't that mean X gets more data across at the same redundancy level? Why have this slower transmitter at all for only the first years, power conservation despite the fresh RTG?
Did they implement something like a new signal analysis method that enabled it?
Well, we do keep building bigger and bigger antennas and antenna arrays. So while Voyager can't change, we do. And we can build more and more sensitive (i.e. noise rejecting) equipment.
X is 8–12 GHz and S is 2–4
I don't know much about the Voyager design but the beam width is related to the frequency and so the S-band transmitter will have a larger beam width and thus can point less accurately that the X-band when trying to talk to Earth. Conversely, X-band is higher frequency than S-band and it's likely they would be able to use more bandwidth. So, interesting trade offs.
> Did they implement something like a new signal analysis method that enabled it?
They arrayed three antennas together.
> Doesn't that mean X gets more data across at the same redundancy level?
There's nothing special about the frequency itself. The advantage for X-band is that the antennas at both ends have more gain. 12 dB for the spacecraft and 11 dB for the ground station for a total of 23 dB.
No, they didn’t. The three antennas are in California, Spain, an Australia; they can’t all point at the same point in the sky at once, and even if two could do so, they’re not designed to work as an interferometric array.
If you catch a site commutating with Voyager you will sometimes see it using two dishes... though most often it's just the one big one at the site. When they do, its not getting signal on two, but having one of the track the carrier wave (I think).
... and to "even if two could do so, they’re not designed to work as an interferometric array." They can.
> The DSN anticipates and responds to user needs. The DSN maintains and upgrades its facilities to accommodate all of its users. This includes not only the implementation of enhancements to improve the scientific return from current experiments and observations, but also long-range research and development to meet the needs of future scientific endeavours.
> Interferometry
> The accurate measurement of radio source positions; includes astrometry, very long baseline interferometry, connected element interferometry, interferometry arrays and orbiting interferometry. Measurement of station locations and Earth orientation for studies of the Earth.
> Very Long Baseline Interferometry
> The purpose of the Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) System is to provide the means of directly measuring plane-of-the-sky angular positions of radio sources (natural or spacecraft), DSN station locations, interstation time and frequency offsets, and Earth orientation parameters.
I'm wondering also. Based on the wording here. I suspect we have more and better telescopes than we did when it launched.
> The flight team was not certain the S-band could be detected at Earth due to the spacecraft’s distance, but engineers with the Deep Space Network were able to find it.
Certainly, but then isn't it expected now with the new antennas? They installed some upgrade but don't know to what sensitivity it goes? Surely they do so the article must be handwavy about it if I'm understanding things correctly
Someone else commented about a wider spread in this other band, though. Perhaps the operators were not sure what that does for adsorptions and reflections by intervening dust or so?
Haven't you ever written code that you thought should work, but didn't due to a reason you couldn't foresee? I don't think the uncertainty here comes from question marks in the link budget equations but from the possibility of unforeseen problems making detection not work when it should.
You can increase throughput by adding repeaters around the solar system, but latency has a hard limit due to the speed of light.
Also throughput could be increased by changing or updating the modulation and coding schemes. AFAIK Pioneer and Voyger probes were still using PSK and FSK.
It depends on whether they're running at a lower data rate due to the low signal power (which leads to low SNR, reducing channel capacity) or if it's just the speed of light delay.
In the former case, a relay could help quite significantly.
In the latter case, it would just add even more delay.
There isn't enough throughput to achieve a negative delay which offsets the actual flight of light time to reach the object. The ratio of throughput delay to actual light delay is so infinitesimal it might as well be zero.
For some reason I find a number of comments in this thread quite weird, like they are written by AIs. I'm guessing there definitely are people who are creating bot accounts with AI at this point...
It would be really great if your comment itself was created by AI to throw off people suspicious of your account and it being a bot and its comments being AI.
Hey smart people, if we were to launch a similar probe today using the most advanced technology available, how long would it take a probe to reach the same distance as Voyager 1?
The lineup barely matters for gravity assist. Jupiter is the vast majority of the total you can get. Saturn has 30% of the mass and 2/3 the orbital velocity, so adding Saturn gets you only 20% more above using Jupiter alone (and the Voyagers didn't really try), and the ice giants are smaller and slower yet.
We could easily overtake Voyager via only Jupiter if we wanted to (and New Horizons eventually will), and Jupiter-to-any-target launch windows come at least every 12 years.
"The beauty of the gravity assist is that you use the gravity field of a large body to change course. A common misconception is that the gravity assist increases speed, but it actually leaves speed unchanged. It's more accurate to say that the gravity assist changes direction, since velocity is both a magnitude (speed) AND a direction."
That's only thinking about it from the perspective of the planet. Relative to the planet, the magnitude of the incoming velocity vector is equal to the magnitude of the outgoing velocity vector. But in the reference frame of the sun, the planet loses an infinitesimal bit of momentum, and the spacecraft gains that momentum.
And that's assuming you don't do an extra burn at periapsis, which is far more efficient at changing speed than doing the burn in interplanetary space.
Where is the quote from? Gravity exerts a force, therefore by newton's second law there is acceleration. Nothing says the acceleration is purely angular. The closer the pass to the planet, the greater the acceleration.
Wiki explains it well. From the frame of reference of ship and planet, the relative speed is the same. But relative to the sun, the ship can be moving faster.
"A gravity assist around a planet changes a spacecraft's velocity (relative to the Sun) by entering and leaving the gravitational sphere of influence of a planet. The sum of the kinetic energies of both bodies remains constant (see elastic collision). A slingshot maneuver can therefore be used to change the spaceship's trajectory and speed relative to the Sun"
There’s an upvoted sub comment to that which has a good correction. That statement as a whole is just not true and a meaningless statement. When you pass an orbiting body you will take some of that body’s orbital momentum and add that to your current momentum. There’s really no semantic argument in my mind that could justify the above statement. You change direction because you have more in total. There’s no bending of the direction here, just addition of new vectors but that’s exactly how all acceleration works anyway so it’s a bit meaningless to make that statement and I’m really not sure what they are trying to get at. Maybe from the pov of the orbiting body there’s no change but that’s not the thing anyone cares about when doing a flyby.
I think the issue mentally is if you treat the gravity of a planet like a valley, where you accelerate into it but on the way back out you lose all that gained velocity. The difference here is that the valley moves in the opposite direction ever so slightly as you pass it, and you gain the momentum from that valley's movement. At least, I think that's how it works.
Not claiming to be smart people, but it depends on what you mean by "available." The fastest probe that we could launch soon is a sundiver solar sail. It requires no new magical technological leaps. It has been explored mostly in service of the solar gravitational lens concept. [0]
The sundiver probe could go 547 AU in 17 years. Voyager 1 is at 162 AU. So around 5 years.
"Launch today" is a very undesirable constraint for this goal. All of the probes that have escaped made extensive use of gravitational slingshot effects, which are only available during favorable launch windows.
The source code isn't hiding in a repo somewhere for security reasons — it's spread around on various pieces of paper and computers over the last 50 years. There isn't a single source of truth. Adds a whole other level of wizardry to keeping the thing running.
It costs money that would better be sent towards other projects, and NASA needs to be as careful as possible with spending their very limited budget.
Having a ton of people run around the office for a couple months to collate a bunch of documents so you can better pass info on to a new generation of workers when the satellite might not even be usable anymore isn't very efficient. Might as well just pay an extra 50% or whatever to the 5 dudes who know what's going on until the thing is inop. Even if it died today, the mission still would've been a massive success.
Given how simple the computer is, I very much doubt it. If anything, it might have a very simple xor encryption or just a passphrase. If anyone were sufficently motivated, it probably would be trivial to snoop on the DSN transmissions and crack any authentication. I'm sure it'd be susceptible to a simple replay attack at any rate
The problem is simply that you need a huge transmitter with (AIUI) some special and unique modulation hardware. Also there's nothing to be gained from interfering with the Voyagers. Really the only practical thing you could do is shut them down a couple of years before they die anyway. There's just no point.
Even if you magically had your own DSN, would anyone but NASA even know exactly where they are with enough precision to communicate with them? In a way, that's now your layer 1 authentication key. The coordinates of where to "point" your DSN.
I'd be very surprised if its exact position in the sky is not public information.
Even if not, it should be fairly straightforward to compute its position from the initial flightplan. Once it escaped Jupiter its trajectory is just a straight line.
I was about to say that Voyager likely also suffers from the Pioneer anomaly, which is suspected to be caused by the RTG's thermal radiation pushing the craft off course [1]. But according to wikipedia we can't really tell because the effect of the maneuvering thrusters that keep Voyager aligned is much bigger than the Pioneer anomaly (Voyager 1 has fuel until about 2040).
It only really needs to be on the upper managements desk:
"The $3.57 you save on capacitors per unit will cost you $50 in lost good will."
On the other hand there is a balance between longevity through simplified maintenance and replacing aged appliances with newer and significantly more efficient models.
Alternative phrasing: "the $3.57 you save (per unit) today will give you a $100.000 end of year bonus, but cost the company millions in future lost sales"
> but cost the company millions in future lost sales
Isn’t the company going to make more sales in the future (and hence more profit)? And isn’t replacing stuff with new versions going to lead to improvements in people’s lives through more efficient, quieter, and more effective technology?
> Isn’t the company going to make more sales in the future
Only if you don't overdo it. When your products break too quickly many customers will stay one-time customers and switch to products from the competition. There's also the reputation damage to consider.
And of course it works best if you have a fairly high market share. If you have a low market share most products on the market are from your competitors, so you can you are better off boosting your reputation with longer-lasting products (compared to other products at the same price point).
Come to think of it, the "break it faster to sell more" strategy works mostly in monopolies, duopolies or with market collusion (like the Phoebus cartel that lowered the lifespan of light bulbs)
It's been my experience that newer technology, though being more efficient, etc, breaks much faster than the old powerhouse tech from the 50's, 60's, and the 70's. I don't see my 1950's-something oven dying anytime soon. It will outlive me if I don't replace it for that one shiny new feature I convince myself I just have to have, or because it doesn't match my curtains.
So, yes, replacing stuff with new versions will bring more and more sales as opposed to building something that will last. Hence "planned obsolescence" and the war on making things repairable that we've seen lately. Great for business, bad for the customer.
To be fair, it's a bit more subtle than that. There's a level of survivor bias involved - all the unreliable appliances from the 50s-70s have long since been hauled off to scrap metal recycling, so what's left are the long-lived ones.
Modern electronics certainly can be made with much higher reliability than their mid-century ancestors, but the driving factor that prevents this is aggressive cost cutting that happily shaves pennies off COGS to shift the statistical distribution to the left. Unless consumers are willing to pay more for long-lived devices, this is doomed to continue.
Or in other words, the $3.57 in savings will allow the product to compete in a lower price segment and increase sales significantly.
It is the behavior of the buyers that drives costs down. People are extremely cost sensitive in the mid to low segments, shifting their purchase decisions from one product to another just because of less than $1 price difference. Some companies cannot survive at all without saving those $3.57.
Buyers do not exist in a vacuum, and consumer behavior is commonly manufactured. Consumer behavior has never been a substantial justification for optimizing for wasteful and environmentally business practices in pursuit of quarterly growth.
> replacing aged appliances with newer and significantly more efficient models
Are we still expecting to make significant efficiency improvements for appliances in the next 30 years? Will it be enough to justify the production of a new appliance?
Legal warranty for appliances like washers, dryers, refrigerators among others should probably be raised to at least 5 years.
The thing that gets me about modern warranties on appliances is how weasely they'll market their warranties. I've got GE clothes washer and dryer proudly proclaiming their 10 year warranty. It's a 10 year warranty on the motor and the drum (IIRC). Not on the motor inverter unit, which had a one-year warranty. Guess which part is likely to fail? Guess what that GE service tech is going to recommend you do after he prices out several hundred dollars of parts he thinks he might need because he's too lazy to actually diagnose the issue?
An LG dishwasher with a similar 10 year warranty on the pumps and what not in the dishwasher. Awesome, great. The display panel has failing LEDs. Is that under that warranty? Nope. Who cares about the pump not technically failing if one can't know what mode the dishwasher is in?
If they're going to stick a sticker on the face advertising their warranty on an appliance it should cover the whole appliance. Not just a small handful of parts that should practically never fail under regular use while all the surrounding stuff has a nearly useless warranty.
I'm so salty about warranties and support these days I usually try and do every possible thing I can do to fix the problem myself before obviously voiding a warranty before I ever bother calling their support. So worthless most of the time.
Sadly, there's has no system for long term reviews. In my dreams, Amazon/etc would engage customers about their durable products and ask how often you still use the product and it/when you're thinking of replacing it...
Given the economics, I wonder if best buy could pay customers $10 for a survey of their old products, knowing that it'll inspire upgrades etc.
I would not spend 10 seconds of my time writing a product review or answering a survey like that. If Amazon is interested in selling good products they can hire product testers who will do teardowns, destructive testing, and running them through a 5-year simulated use durability test.
Amazon is now, largely, just Aliexpress with faster shipping and easier returns (and higher prices).
Even in areas where they have brand name products, it's often impossible to surface them through their search. (I've, many times, failed to find something there and then went and searched Google/etc and the top result has been... an Amazon link to exactly what I'm looking for.) And if you purchase through Amazon, there's no reason to believe it's not gray market or something else where you may end up having issues with support/warranty if you ever need.
And combined with the inventory commingling, even if you find brand name products there you can't be sure you'll actually receive it and not a knock-off. So it really only makes sense to order things that are already the cheap/knock-off quality anyway.
So... yeah, there was a nice period of time there where Amazon was just "shopping made more convenient". These days it's "Aliexpress made more convenient". Unless I'm setting out to buy cheaply made Chinese imports with no warranty, I'm not even go to start looking on Amazon. There's little reason to.
> "The $3.57 you save on capacitors per unit will cost you $50 in lost good will."
Or it might cost you $0 in lost good will, and will gain you $5 in sales because many price-sensitive people will buy the thing that's cheapest, without doing an omniscient analysis of its quality.
Not to mention that gold-plating your capacitors won't do you much good if some other part is expected to fail first.
>if you cut corners, you may be rich, but then I'll think you're a bad boy!
Uh oh, a moral judgement from a peasant? Say it aint so. Anything but that. I'm literally shaking right now.
Anyway, here are some actual incentives:
- If you do some shady corner-cutting, you'll be legally compelled to trade in your Bugatti and drive a used Kia the rest of your life
- If this chemical causes bodily harm to me, we shall inflict bodily harm on thee
- A portion of the profits will be placed in a trust and will be passed down to your children, if and only if your product lasts long enough to be passed down to our children
- If you (banker) lose our money, you will lose your head
These rules discourage new businesses from starting and you end up in a situation like France where their largest company is some fashion company formed eons ago (probably before all the regulations).
France is an extremely wealthy country with possibly the best quality of life in the world - many would say better than in the English-speaking countries home to most of HN.
I know people get frustrated with broken appliances and electronics, but I feel like once you look at the forces involved it seems fairly obvious that it'll happen:
* Environmental regulations require additional or more complicated systems - which adds points of failure (IE: Variable-speed motor controllers, Exhaust Gas Recycling, etc). They also require other changes - like using lightweight plastics where metals would have been used previously. Plastic fan blades crack, metal ones don't.
* Consumers, on the whole, only care about price and features. Those are tangible. Some people care about things like maintainability and longevity - but they make up a tiny, insignificant fraction of consumers. Thus, companies optimize for price - even if it comes at the cost of longevity. Any company that doesn't quickly loses market share to global competition from dozens of others that are more than willing to make that sacrifice and offer a better deal.
Those two factors explain everything about why modern appliances fail the way they do.
Consumer products like cars, washing machines, etc... are mass produced and made to last for a specified amount of time, at the lowest possible price. Voyagers were unique pieces made with a quasi-unlimited budget.
The thing with consumer products is not evil, they are made to consumer expectations. Would you buy a $10k washing machine? Probably not, even if is designed to outlast you. Of course you also won't buy a washing machine that lasts a week, no matter how cheap it is. Manufacturers did studies and noticed that there is a sweet spot at around 10 years or so of lifetime for typical household usage. More than that and it become too expensive and people might want to change anyways to benefit from new technologies or some other reasons.
Once the "ideal" lifetime have been established, you are going to have parts that last the expected 10 years, others that last less, and other that last more, possibly forever. The parts that break too early need to be addressed as it may cause expensive warranty returns and a loss in reputation. But the parts that last forever also need to be addressed. Let's say the water pump is over-specified, sure it is great, it will never fail, etc... but all that doesn't matter because the machine will be trashed because of some other failure. So why would the manufacturer and ultimately the customer pay extra for that pump they have no need for. Instead, a cheaper should be used. The ideal consumer product is one where every part breaks down at the end of the expected life of the product, but not before, any more than that is a waste of money.
That's thanks to that value engineering that we all can afford cars, washing machines fridges and televisions, with cash to spare. These are not luxuries for the elite anymore. They are not made like they used to, but we don't pay them like we used to either.
On the other hand, it's environment isn't particularly hostile (no moisture, dust, vibration, though it gets more radiation than on Earth), and I think it doesn't have much in the way of moving parts (?)
Voyager is something that I keep thinking every time I see people talking about what great things musk/spacex are doing with their fail often/fail fast approach.
I do get the value of iterating quickly towards a solution but that does not invalidate the conservative engineering approach other people have to take to build something much more stable/reliable where they have to be very cautious and can't just break things until you have a solution.
Voyagers were built by JPL and not contracted out so align to a degree with the spacex model. In part this was because budget got cut badly.
“In order to reduce costs and overheads, NASA decided to leave design and construction of the Mariner Jupiter-Saturn spacecraft to JPL, rather than to Boeing, General Electric, Hughes, Martin Marietta, and North American Rockwell, all of which had some level of preparation for a Grand Tour proposal. The largest aerospace firms lobbied NASA Headquarters and Congress for the contracts. In order for expensive projects to pass congressional scrutiny as part of the NASA budget, they often had to include an intention to contract out much of the work” voyager - Andrew J. Butrica
I think they also did build a test spacecraft ?
Anyways the approach (smaller focused team) contrasts with the big SLS type projects that are contracted out for political reasons.
About a decade ago I bought a USB fan to plug into my computer at work. It has been turned on and running for almost 10 years straight. I thought to myself "I should actually leave a good Amazon review for this fan, it's held up to the test of time for little consumer electronics like this."
I went to look up my purchase but not only is that listing gone, the brand no longer exists.
Exactly. You want a W/D combo that'll last forever? No gimmicks? No nonsense? Get a speed queen. Ugly as hell, basic as hell, and built like a brick shithouse and made right here in the good ol' US of A.
Problem is... they're expensive. Real pricey. This kinda industrial-tier consumer stuff does exist, but very few people bother buying it.
Speed Queens were exclusively installed each of the dozens of coin-operated laundromats I’ve visited in my life. This is because a machine awaiting repairs doesn’t make the owner a penny.
As always, ask or imitate an expert with aligned incentives. A seasoned local auto shop owner guided me towards Acura after two of my fancy German cars needed multiple expensive repairs. He doesn’t service Honda group vehicles, but drives an Acura himself and I couldn’t be happier after listening to his advice.
Dog no they don’t lol. My family has been in both ecosystems over the years and by far the iPhones outlast the Android phones they buy both in quality and in updates.
True, but what percentage of phone owners will actually do this. Less than a fraction of a percent? The remaining 99 percent chuck their phone in a landfill when it gets slow.
Conversely, the system which has been described as the longest running computer system after Voyager is the UK's Police National Computer - turning 50 and still in use today. Most UK citizens will be on it in some way, shape or form.
Keeping it alive is a remarkable feat, but costing taxpayers eye watering sums of money, due to the ever increasing shortage of skills, while a modern cloud alternative is developed. Be careful what you wish for.
Plenty of people buy secondhand equipment. Manufacturers want to stop that; spare parts are hard to get or needlessly expensive, and manuals are woefully incomplete or nonexistent.
I've contracted for someone whose customers thought so. (My job involved making stuff work with without an important part from a defunct vendor.)
Their costs really did increase all the time. Not needlessly, despite what some people thought: their cost per spare part really did grow quite a lot, as the number needed per year decreased and the fixed overhead slowly increased.
Wow: Triggering the protection system a second time turned off the regular radio:
"While the S-band uses less power, Voyager 1 had not used it to communicate with Earth since 1981. It uses a different frequency than the X-band transmitters signal is significantly fainter. The flight team was not certain the S-band could be detected at Earth due to the spacecraft’s distance, but engineers with the Deep Space Network were able to find it."
Heros, both those who made the S-band radio and those who managed to retrieve the signal.
(thinking aloud/voice in my head)
If 'those things' are recharged by sunlight, I wonder how will they get the energy to continue transmitting (assuming they have whatever source AND solar panels - for when the fuel runs out and they can't catch any sunlight?)
my dialogue with ChatGPT:
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are powered by \*Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs)\*. These RTGs use the natural decay of \*plutonium-238\* to generate heat, which is then converted into electricity using thermoelectric materials.
Here’s how the process works:
1. \*Radioactive Decay\*: Plutonium-238, a radioactive isotope, decays over time, releasing a consistent amount of heat.
2. \*Thermoelectric Conversion\*: Thermocouples in the RTGs convert this heat directly into electricity.
3. \*Power Supply\*: This generated electricity powers the instruments, computers, and communication systems on each spacecraft.
Each year, the power output of the RTGs decreases slightly as the plutonium decays, so the Voyager missions have had to shut down non-essential systems over time to conserve power. Despite this, both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have enough energy to continue transmitting until at least the late 2020s, when their power levels will likely drop below the minimum required for communication.
That's the problem, they won't have enough energy to transmit anymore.
The Voyager probes are powered entirely from their RTGs, they have no solar panels nor batteries[1]. So if the power output from the RTGs drops below the level needed to power the transmitter, Voyager can't talk to us anymore. There's no batteries that can be recharged and no solar panels it ever drew power from.
The exciting part from this discovery is the potential to keep talking to Voyager longer than we thought. If the S-band transmitter uses less power and we're still able to detect that signal, we may be able to communicate with the probes with lower RTG outputs than we initially thought. Though at that point, if the radio is the only thing still running and there's no instruments operating, the usefulness is probably pretty low at that point.
Fundamentally there isn't any change in the underlying physics. You're limited by the half life of the isotope, so you either choose a longer-lived isotope (which actually may be even harder post Cold War as much of the ideal isotopes were byproducts of nuclear weapons manufacturing) or launch a bigger RTG than you need so you have enough power later on in the mission.
I think the more interesting thing is its suddenly become so much cheaper to put things in orbit, we could simply put a larger satellite with a larger nuclear battery out there.
There's a good documentary about the quirky team of NASA engineers that keep in contact with the Voyager probes...
It's slightly melancholic, the engineers are aging, the mission's heyday is long past... but there's something gripping about it...
"It's Quieter in the Twilight" (2022)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
The mission's heyday is right now! They are in interstellar space!
We can and have send other probes to the planets.
Definitely true. What Voyager is doing right now is mind blowing.
Its a shame Carl Sagan is with us to cheer.
A Carl Sagan AI would be fun and almost somehow appropriate.
Here you go:
https://character.ai/chat/J9KKnR34ouSfAiNQIlDnY2v8pW5a1-QGYG...
Now try not to commit suicide, like the floridian young man.
Thank you for the recommendation! I just finished, and it was definitely worth the watch.
Started watching after your comment.. Fantastic documentary! And its great to see some shots of the screens they use to manage the probes and stuff. And yes, some ninjas cutting onions..
... I found it a bit poignant / emotional as well! ... those engineers in a dusty office beside McDonalds... quietly keeping the mission going... in touch with something that's beyond our solar system now... True engineers! No glitz... quiet dedication...
favorited this post just to be able to come back to this comment and watch the documentary. Thanks!
> [The S-band] uses a different frequency than the X-band transmitters signal is significantly fainter. The flight team was not certain the S-band could be detected at Earth due to the spacecraft’s distance, but [it turned out to work]
This is the most fascinating part to me. Isn't it well-established how sensitive a signal we can hear? Did they implement something like a new signal analysis method that enabled it?
And it says this wasn't used or even tried since the 80s anymore, I guess it grew too faint. Looking up the frequencies, X is 8–12 GHz and S is 2–4. Doesn't that mean X gets more data across at the same redundancy level? Why have this slower transmitter at all for only the first years, power conservation despite the fresh RTG?
Did they implement something like a new signal analysis method that enabled it?
Well, we do keep building bigger and bigger antennas and antenna arrays. So while Voyager can't change, we do. And we can build more and more sensitive (i.e. noise rejecting) equipment.
X is 8–12 GHz and S is 2–4
I don't know much about the Voyager design but the beam width is related to the frequency and so the S-band transmitter will have a larger beam width and thus can point less accurately that the X-band when trying to talk to Earth. Conversely, X-band is higher frequency than S-band and it's likely they would be able to use more bandwidth. So, interesting trade offs.
> Did they implement something like a new signal analysis method that enabled it?
They arrayed three antennas together.
> Doesn't that mean X gets more data across at the same redundancy level?
There's nothing special about the frequency itself. The advantage for X-band is that the antennas at both ends have more gain. 12 dB for the spacecraft and 11 dB for the ground station for a total of 23 dB.
> They arrayed three antennas together.
No, they didn’t. The three antennas are in California, Spain, an Australia; they can’t all point at the same point in the sky at once, and even if two could do so, they’re not designed to work as an interferometric array.
There's more than one antenna at each site.
https://x.com/CanberraDSN/status/1851446497453494663
https://x.com/vlex26/status/1849618522823065655
Ah, OK, thanks for the link.
https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/dsn-now/dsn.html for the "what is it looking at right now"
If you catch a site commutating with Voyager you will sometimes see it using two dishes... though most often it's just the one big one at the site. When they do, its not getting signal on two, but having one of the track the carrier wave (I think).
https://www.cdscc.nasa.gov/Pages/antennas.html
... and to "even if two could do so, they’re not designed to work as an interferometric array." They can.
> The DSN anticipates and responds to user needs. The DSN maintains and upgrades its facilities to accommodate all of its users. This includes not only the implementation of enhancements to improve the scientific return from current experiments and observations, but also long-range research and development to meet the needs of future scientific endeavours.
> Interferometry
> The accurate measurement of radio source positions; includes astrometry, very long baseline interferometry, connected element interferometry, interferometry arrays and orbiting interferometry. Measurement of station locations and Earth orientation for studies of the Earth.
> Very Long Baseline Interferometry
> The purpose of the Very Long Baseline Interferometry (VLBI) System is to provide the means of directly measuring plane-of-the-sky angular positions of radio sources (natural or spacecraft), DSN station locations, interstation time and frequency offsets, and Earth orientation parameters.
I'm wondering also. Based on the wording here. I suspect we have more and better telescopes than we did when it launched.
> The flight team was not certain the S-band could be detected at Earth due to the spacecraft’s distance, but engineers with the Deep Space Network were able to find it.
Certainly, but then isn't it expected now with the new antennas? They installed some upgrade but don't know to what sensitivity it goes? Surely they do so the article must be handwavy about it if I'm understanding things correctly
Someone else commented about a wider spread in this other band, though. Perhaps the operators were not sure what that does for adsorptions and reflections by intervening dust or so?
Haven't you ever written code that you thought should work, but didn't due to a reason you couldn't foresee? I don't think the uncertainty here comes from question marks in the link budget equations but from the possibility of unforeseen problems making detection not work when it should.
So you're troubleshooting a 47 year old spacecraft that is 15 billion miles away.
The round trip time is 45 hours.
That is some kind of latency!
i wonder if the commands include some kind of conditions in them, so you could account for various things at once without a 90h round trip
https://voyager.gsfc.nasa.gov/Library/DeepCommo_Chapter3--14... (start at pdf page 35) might have context [1].
[1] Sourced via https://voyager.gsfc.nasa.gov/Library/VOY_library.html
And “packet” loss!
Maybe Elon Musk could launch a couple of his Starlink satellites into deep space and reduce that latency.
That or apply xkcd #303: https://xkcd.com/303.
You can increase throughput by adding repeaters around the solar system, but latency has a hard limit due to the speed of light.
Also throughput could be increased by changing or updating the modulation and coding schemes. AFAIK Pioneer and Voyger probes were still using PSK and FSK.
Space lasers?
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-deep-space-optical-comm-...
A cool idea. But will the additional hops reduce latency or increase it?
It depends on whether they're running at a lower data rate due to the low signal power (which leads to low SNR, reducing channel capacity) or if it's just the speed of light delay.
In the former case, a relay could help quite significantly.
In the latter case, it would just add even more delay.
You can alter throughput. You cannot alter delay. You also can only really broadcast at high power from one side.
Deep space RTT is unavoidable.
Throughput impacts delay when you send non-zero packet sizes.
There isn't enough throughput to achieve a negative delay which offsets the actual flight of light time to reach the object. The ratio of throughput delay to actual light delay is so infinitesimal it might as well be zero.
Elon Musk can improve the speed of light?
how would that even work? On the whole spectrum. From the starlink satellite receiving signal to it being remotely justified in economical terms.
The round trip time is due to the speed of light, no amount of money and hardware thrown at the problem, on earth or in space, will improve that.
Maybe with enough money put into research into quantum entanglement, it might one day yield faster than light communication.
It won't, anymore than research into the speed of a spot of light cast onto a surface by a flashlight will result in faster than light communication.
For some reason I find a number of comments in this thread quite weird, like they are written by AIs. I'm guessing there definitely are people who are creating bot accounts with AI at this point...
It would be really great if your comment itself was created by AI to throw off people suspicious of your account and it being a bot and its comments being AI.
If you would like a visualization of Voyager 1's current location, relative to our solar system, a quick google search yielded,
https://theskylive.com/voyager1-info#orbitdiagramcontainer
It's absolutely impressive, yet at the same time somewhat underwhelming when compared to the vastness of our galaxy.
Hey smart people, if we were to launch a similar probe today using the most advanced technology available, how long would it take a probe to reach the same distance as Voyager 1?
The Voyager probes enjoyed gravity assists from all of the outer planets [1] which won’t align again until the middle of the next century [2].
[1]: https://space.stackexchange.com/a/3522
[2]: https://space.stackexchange.com/a/5076
The lineup barely matters for gravity assist. Jupiter is the vast majority of the total you can get. Saturn has 30% of the mass and 2/3 the orbital velocity, so adding Saturn gets you only 20% more above using Jupiter alone (and the Voyagers didn't really try), and the ice giants are smaller and slower yet.
We could easily overtake Voyager via only Jupiter if we wanted to (and New Horizons eventually will), and Jupiter-to-any-target launch windows come at least every 12 years.
Solar Oberth meneuver FTW! ;-)
https://www.universetoday.com/154791/the-best-way-to-leave-t...
(I have also seen a variant with an upper stage class SRB used for the meneuver.)
But...
"The beauty of the gravity assist is that you use the gravity field of a large body to change course. A common misconception is that the gravity assist increases speed, but it actually leaves speed unchanged. It's more accurate to say that the gravity assist changes direction, since velocity is both a magnitude (speed) AND a direction."
That's only thinking about it from the perspective of the planet. Relative to the planet, the magnitude of the incoming velocity vector is equal to the magnitude of the outgoing velocity vector. But in the reference frame of the sun, the planet loses an infinitesimal bit of momentum, and the spacecraft gains that momentum.
And that's assuming you don't do an extra burn at periapsis, which is far more efficient at changing speed than doing the burn in interplanetary space.
Where is the quote from? Gravity exerts a force, therefore by newton's second law there is acceleration. Nothing says the acceleration is purely angular. The closer the pass to the planet, the greater the acceleration.
Wiki explains it well. From the frame of reference of ship and planet, the relative speed is the same. But relative to the sun, the ship can be moving faster.
"A gravity assist around a planet changes a spacecraft's velocity (relative to the Sun) by entering and leaving the gravitational sphere of influence of a planet. The sum of the kinetic energies of both bodies remains constant (see elastic collision). A slingshot maneuver can therefore be used to change the spaceship's trajectory and speed relative to the Sun"
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gravity_assist
There’s an upvoted sub comment to that which has a good correction. That statement as a whole is just not true and a meaningless statement. When you pass an orbiting body you will take some of that body’s orbital momentum and add that to your current momentum. There’s really no semantic argument in my mind that could justify the above statement. You change direction because you have more in total. There’s no bending of the direction here, just addition of new vectors but that’s exactly how all acceleration works anyway so it’s a bit meaningless to make that statement and I’m really not sure what they are trying to get at. Maybe from the pov of the orbiting body there’s no change but that’s not the thing anyone cares about when doing a flyby.
I think the issue mentally is if you treat the gravity of a planet like a valley, where you accelerate into it but on the way back out you lose all that gained velocity. The difference here is that the valley moves in the opposite direction ever so slightly as you pass it, and you gain the momentum from that valley's movement. At least, I think that's how it works.
Not claiming to be smart people, but it depends on what you mean by "available." The fastest probe that we could launch soon is a sundiver solar sail. It requires no new magical technological leaps. It has been explored mostly in service of the solar gravitational lens concept. [0]
The sundiver probe could go 547 AU in 17 years. Voyager 1 is at 162 AU. So around 5 years.
[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=41865107
New Horizons was launched in 2006, and it will reach the same distance from the Sun as Voyager 1 is _currently_ in about 32 years.
Good lord willing and the creeks don’t rise.
It will definitely happen, the only real question is if we're still talking to New Horizon when it passes Voyager 1.
In fact I wonder if we'll stop talking to Voyager 1 before or after New Horizon.
Really depends how much money you want to spend and if you're willing to wait a bit longer for Starship orbital refueling to be tested.
We could build a more or less arbitrarily large rocket in orbit by adding more and more fuel. More fuel means more delta-V means the probe is faster.
It's ineffective, you need more stages.
Tsiolkovsky's equation shows how much dV you get with a given wet : dry (empty) mass of a rocket stage. Very quickly it's becoming very inefficient.
Unless you are talking about some untested rocket that dumps empty fuel tanks in pairs. (Like in the dV book by Daniel Suarez).
"Launch today" is a very undesirable constraint for this goal. All of the probes that have escaped made extensive use of gravitational slingshot effects, which are only available during favorable launch windows.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_lea...
Long story short: they plan these out for decades at a time, and take your best shot when the planets align, literally.
We needed the slingshotting because until recently on-orbit construction was mostly a pipe-dream.
If you can build larger ships in orbit, relatively cheaply, you can go a lot more direct, a lot faster.
Even on-orbit refueling is a huge boon for orbital assist flexibility.
Can't wait for them to open source the code once it finally dies. Right now they probably can't do that because of security concerns.
Check out this talk: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dF_9YcehCZo
The source code isn't hiding in a repo somewhere for security reasons — it's spread around on various pieces of paper and computers over the last 50 years. There isn't a single source of truth. Adds a whole other level of wizardry to keeping the thing running.
Like, maybe that was originally true, but they have had decades. Numerous times contact has been lost, hardware failed, key people died, etc.
How has nobody at the top ordered a digitization and consolidation of all known code and supporting documentation during that time frame.
It costs money that would better be sent towards other projects, and NASA needs to be as careful as possible with spending their very limited budget.
Having a ton of people run around the office for a couple months to collate a bunch of documents so you can better pass info on to a new generation of workers when the satellite might not even be usable anymore isn't very efficient. Might as well just pay an extra 50% or whatever to the 5 dudes who know what's going on until the thing is inop. Even if it died today, the mission still would've been a massive success.
The architecture probably doesn’t lend itself to the same development process we are all familiar with.
> security concerns
Does anyone know whether the Voyagers even do any command authentication?
Probably doesn't matter now as only the dsn has the ability to talk to them, and that happens comparatively rarely.
Given how simple the computer is, I very much doubt it. If anything, it might have a very simple xor encryption or just a passphrase. If anyone were sufficently motivated, it probably would be trivial to snoop on the DSN transmissions and crack any authentication. I'm sure it'd be susceptible to a simple replay attack at any rate
The problem is simply that you need a huge transmitter with (AIUI) some special and unique modulation hardware. Also there's nothing to be gained from interfering with the Voyagers. Really the only practical thing you could do is shut them down a couple of years before they die anyway. There's just no point.
Surely, hacking them to produce (faked) evidence of alien life would be worth it to somebody.
Even if you magically had your own DSN, would anyone but NASA even know exactly where they are with enough precision to communicate with them? In a way, that's now your layer 1 authentication key. The coordinates of where to "point" your DSN.
I'd be very surprised if its exact position in the sky is not public information.
Even if not, it should be fairly straightforward to compute its position from the initial flightplan. Once it escaped Jupiter its trajectory is just a straight line.
I was about to say that Voyager likely also suffers from the Pioneer anomaly, which is suspected to be caused by the RTG's thermal radiation pushing the craft off course [1]. But according to wikipedia we can't really tell because the effect of the maneuvering thrusters that keep Voyager aligned is much bigger than the Pioneer anomaly (Voyager 1 has fuel until about 2040).
1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pioneer_anomaly
I don't think they are the kind of people that will take unnecessary risks.
FTA: "Voyagers 1 and 2 have been flying for more than 47 years..."
That should be written on a poster that is put on each desk of each employee of each car/washing machine/fridge/television manufacturer.
It only really needs to be on the upper managements desk:
"The $3.57 you save on capacitors per unit will cost you $50 in lost good will."
On the other hand there is a balance between longevity through simplified maintenance and replacing aged appliances with newer and significantly more efficient models.
Alternative phrasing: "the $3.57 you save (per unit) today will give you a $100.000 end of year bonus, but cost the company millions in future lost sales"
Guess what theyre gonna do?
> but cost the company millions in future lost sales
Isn’t the company going to make more sales in the future (and hence more profit)? And isn’t replacing stuff with new versions going to lead to improvements in people’s lives through more efficient, quieter, and more effective technology?
> Isn’t the company going to make more sales in the future
Only if you don't overdo it. When your products break too quickly many customers will stay one-time customers and switch to products from the competition. There's also the reputation damage to consider.
And of course it works best if you have a fairly high market share. If you have a low market share most products on the market are from your competitors, so you can you are better off boosting your reputation with longer-lasting products (compared to other products at the same price point).
Come to think of it, the "break it faster to sell more" strategy works mostly in monopolies, duopolies or with market collusion (like the Phoebus cartel that lowered the lifespan of light bulbs)
It's been my experience that newer technology, though being more efficient, etc, breaks much faster than the old powerhouse tech from the 50's, 60's, and the 70's. I don't see my 1950's-something oven dying anytime soon. It will outlive me if I don't replace it for that one shiny new feature I convince myself I just have to have, or because it doesn't match my curtains.
So, yes, replacing stuff with new versions will bring more and more sales as opposed to building something that will last. Hence "planned obsolescence" and the war on making things repairable that we've seen lately. Great for business, bad for the customer.
To be fair, it's a bit more subtle than that. There's a level of survivor bias involved - all the unreliable appliances from the 50s-70s have long since been hauled off to scrap metal recycling, so what's left are the long-lived ones.
Modern electronics certainly can be made with much higher reliability than their mid-century ancestors, but the driving factor that prevents this is aggressive cost cutting that happily shaves pennies off COGS to shift the statistical distribution to the left. Unless consumers are willing to pay more for long-lived devices, this is doomed to continue.
This. Survivorship bias is somehow not allowed to exist when talking about old appliances.
Yet people understand it with cars. Maybe because it’s moving?
Sure, but if the exec in question has moved on to another company by then, what do they care?
Or in other words, the $3.57 in savings will allow the product to compete in a lower price segment and increase sales significantly.
It is the behavior of the buyers that drives costs down. People are extremely cost sensitive in the mid to low segments, shifting their purchase decisions from one product to another just because of less than $1 price difference. Some companies cannot survive at all without saving those $3.57.
Buyers do not exist in a vacuum, and consumer behavior is commonly manufactured. Consumer behavior has never been a substantial justification for optimizing for wasteful and environmentally business practices in pursuit of quarterly growth.
> Buyers do not exist in a vacuum
Unlike Voyagers 1 and 2
> replacing aged appliances with newer and significantly more efficient models
Are we still expecting to make significant efficiency improvements for appliances in the next 30 years? Will it be enough to justify the production of a new appliance?
Legal warranty for appliances like washers, dryers, refrigerators among others should probably be raised to at least 5 years.
The thing that gets me about modern warranties on appliances is how weasely they'll market their warranties. I've got GE clothes washer and dryer proudly proclaiming their 10 year warranty. It's a 10 year warranty on the motor and the drum (IIRC). Not on the motor inverter unit, which had a one-year warranty. Guess which part is likely to fail? Guess what that GE service tech is going to recommend you do after he prices out several hundred dollars of parts he thinks he might need because he's too lazy to actually diagnose the issue?
An LG dishwasher with a similar 10 year warranty on the pumps and what not in the dishwasher. Awesome, great. The display panel has failing LEDs. Is that under that warranty? Nope. Who cares about the pump not technically failing if one can't know what mode the dishwasher is in?
If they're going to stick a sticker on the face advertising their warranty on an appliance it should cover the whole appliance. Not just a small handful of parts that should practically never fail under regular use while all the surrounding stuff has a nearly useless warranty.
I'm so salty about warranties and support these days I usually try and do every possible thing I can do to fix the problem myself before obviously voiding a warranty before I ever bother calling their support. So worthless most of the time.
Not to mention binding arbitration with opt-out that is a pain in the ass. I had to go through this for an LG washer recently.
And being $3.57 more expensive than the other guy will deny you 90% of sales on amazon or any other online marketplace.
Sadly, there's has no system for long term reviews. In my dreams, Amazon/etc would engage customers about their durable products and ask how often you still use the product and it/when you're thinking of replacing it...
Given the economics, I wonder if best buy could pay customers $10 for a survey of their old products, knowing that it'll inspire upgrades etc.
I would not spend 10 seconds of my time writing a product review or answering a survey like that. If Amazon is interested in selling good products they can hire product testers who will do teardowns, destructive testing, and running them through a 5-year simulated use durability test.
That's Anti-Amazon behavior. Whatever is going on with their Alibaba-like store is not about finding good products.
Do you pay for Consumer Reports?
i lost my faith in amazon. its all alibaba rebrands and mass fake reviews, plus amazon pushing their own chepo brand into every search.
its shocking how amazon went from 'me getting a package every week' to 'i go there only if i have too'
Amazon is now, largely, just Aliexpress with faster shipping and easier returns (and higher prices).
Even in areas where they have brand name products, it's often impossible to surface them through their search. (I've, many times, failed to find something there and then went and searched Google/etc and the top result has been... an Amazon link to exactly what I'm looking for.) And if you purchase through Amazon, there's no reason to believe it's not gray market or something else where you may end up having issues with support/warranty if you ever need.
And combined with the inventory commingling, even if you find brand name products there you can't be sure you'll actually receive it and not a knock-off. So it really only makes sense to order things that are already the cheap/knock-off quality anyway.
So... yeah, there was a nice period of time there where Amazon was just "shopping made more convenient". These days it's "Aliexpress made more convenient". Unless I'm setting out to buy cheaply made Chinese imports with no warranty, I'm not even go to start looking on Amazon. There's little reason to.
They have the data to infer reliability rates based on things like returns, time to purchase similar item, frequency of repeat purchase, etc.
Over the volume of say Amazon, The noisiness of varied intent will normalize itself out across a sector.
They could surface this as a reliability metric on some kind of relative scale.
They could...
> "The $3.57 you save on capacitors per unit will cost you $50 in lost good will."
Or it might cost you $0 in lost good will, and will gain you $5 in sales because many price-sensitive people will buy the thing that's cheapest, without doing an omniscient analysis of its quality.
Not to mention that gold-plating your capacitors won't do you much good if some other part is expected to fail first.
>if you cut corners, you may be rich, but then I'll think you're a bad boy!
Uh oh, a moral judgement from a peasant? Say it aint so. Anything but that. I'm literally shaking right now.
Anyway, here are some actual incentives:
- If you do some shady corner-cutting, you'll be legally compelled to trade in your Bugatti and drive a used Kia the rest of your life
- If this chemical causes bodily harm to me, we shall inflict bodily harm on thee
- A portion of the profits will be placed in a trust and will be passed down to your children, if and only if your product lasts long enough to be passed down to our children
- If you (banker) lose our money, you will lose your head
These rules discourage new businesses from starting and you end up in a situation like France where their largest company is some fashion company formed eons ago (probably before all the regulations).
> These rules discourage new businesses from starting
No. They encourage new businesses to start without compromising on the fundamental stuff.
France is an extremely wealthy country with possibly the best quality of life in the world - many would say better than in the English-speaking countries home to most of HN.
I know people get frustrated with broken appliances and electronics, but I feel like once you look at the forces involved it seems fairly obvious that it'll happen:
* Environmental regulations require additional or more complicated systems - which adds points of failure (IE: Variable-speed motor controllers, Exhaust Gas Recycling, etc). They also require other changes - like using lightweight plastics where metals would have been used previously. Plastic fan blades crack, metal ones don't.
* Consumers, on the whole, only care about price and features. Those are tangible. Some people care about things like maintainability and longevity - but they make up a tiny, insignificant fraction of consumers. Thus, companies optimize for price - even if it comes at the cost of longevity. Any company that doesn't quickly loses market share to global competition from dozens of others that are more than willing to make that sacrifice and offer a better deal.
Those two factors explain everything about why modern appliances fail the way they do.
Consumer products like cars, washing machines, etc... are mass produced and made to last for a specified amount of time, at the lowest possible price. Voyagers were unique pieces made with a quasi-unlimited budget.
The thing with consumer products is not evil, they are made to consumer expectations. Would you buy a $10k washing machine? Probably not, even if is designed to outlast you. Of course you also won't buy a washing machine that lasts a week, no matter how cheap it is. Manufacturers did studies and noticed that there is a sweet spot at around 10 years or so of lifetime for typical household usage. More than that and it become too expensive and people might want to change anyways to benefit from new technologies or some other reasons.
Once the "ideal" lifetime have been established, you are going to have parts that last the expected 10 years, others that last less, and other that last more, possibly forever. The parts that break too early need to be addressed as it may cause expensive warranty returns and a loss in reputation. But the parts that last forever also need to be addressed. Let's say the water pump is over-specified, sure it is great, it will never fail, etc... but all that doesn't matter because the machine will be trashed because of some other failure. So why would the manufacturer and ultimately the customer pay extra for that pump they have no need for. Instead, a cheaper should be used. The ideal consumer product is one where every part breaks down at the end of the expected life of the product, but not before, any more than that is a waste of money.
That's thanks to that value engineering that we all can afford cars, washing machines fridges and televisions, with cash to spare. These are not luxuries for the elite anymore. They are not made like they used to, but we don't pay them like we used to either.
On the other hand, it's environment isn't particularly hostile (no moisture, dust, vibration, though it gets more radiation than on Earth), and I think it doesn't have much in the way of moving parts (?)
Space is pretty hostile:
https://theconversation.com/explainer-how-hostile-is-space-2...
If I recall its gets more hostile after leaving the heliopsphere
Voyager is something that I keep thinking every time I see people talking about what great things musk/spacex are doing with their fail often/fail fast approach.
I do get the value of iterating quickly towards a solution but that does not invalidate the conservative engineering approach other people have to take to build something much more stable/reliable where they have to be very cautious and can't just break things until you have a solution.
Voyagers were built by JPL and not contracted out so align to a degree with the spacex model. In part this was because budget got cut badly.
“In order to reduce costs and overheads, NASA decided to leave design and construction of the Mariner Jupiter-Saturn spacecraft to JPL, rather than to Boeing, General Electric, Hughes, Martin Marietta, and North American Rockwell, all of which had some level of preparation for a Grand Tour proposal. The largest aerospace firms lobbied NASA Headquarters and Congress for the contracts. In order for expensive projects to pass congressional scrutiny as part of the NASA budget, they often had to include an intention to contract out much of the work” voyager - Andrew J. Butrica
I think they also did build a test spacecraft ?
Anyways the approach (smaller focused team) contrasts with the big SLS type projects that are contracted out for political reasons.
They’re optimizing for different priorities. Obviously you need to be conservative when launches cost so much you can only afford ~one shot.
Nice idea, if you want to go out of business!
People don't buy quality: people buy cheap!
About a decade ago I bought a USB fan to plug into my computer at work. It has been turned on and running for almost 10 years straight. I thought to myself "I should actually leave a good Amazon review for this fan, it's held up to the test of time for little consumer electronics like this."
I went to look up my purchase but not only is that listing gone, the brand no longer exists.
Exactly. You want a W/D combo that'll last forever? No gimmicks? No nonsense? Get a speed queen. Ugly as hell, basic as hell, and built like a brick shithouse and made right here in the good ol' US of A.
Problem is... they're expensive. Real pricey. This kinda industrial-tier consumer stuff does exist, but very few people bother buying it.
Thanks for the recommendation - I had never heard of them, but I'll definitely give them a look whenever my current appliances die.
Speed Queens were exclusively installed each of the dozens of coin-operated laundromats I’ve visited in my life. This is because a machine awaiting repairs doesn’t make the owner a penny.
As always, ask or imitate an expert with aligned incentives. A seasoned local auto shop owner guided me towards Acura after two of my fancy German cars needed multiple expensive repairs. He doesn’t service Honda group vehicles, but drives an Acura himself and I couldn’t be happier after listening to his advice.
and that's why iPhones never catched up
Ironic that iPhones are both expensive _and_ come with planned obsolescence
Dog no they don’t lol. My family has been in both ecosystems over the years and by far the iPhones outlast the Android phones they buy both in quality and in updates.
Counterpoint: one can only unlock the bootloader on Android phones and extend the device life for much longer than intended or supported by the OEM.
True, but what percentage of phone owners will actually do this. Less than a fraction of a percent? The remaining 99 percent chuck their phone in a landfill when it gets slow.
Both what you are saying and what the GP is saying can be true at the same time.
Some products do better as Veblen goods than others. You can't show off your dishwasher as easily as your new Ferrari or iPhone :)
The engineers know this.
Now, how do you get the people buying these things to buy the better engineered one when the one sitting right next to it is $200 cheaper?
Conversely, the system which has been described as the longest running computer system after Voyager is the UK's Police National Computer - turning 50 and still in use today. Most UK citizens will be on it in some way, shape or form.
Keeping it alive is a remarkable feat, but costing taxpayers eye watering sums of money, due to the ever increasing shortage of skills, while a modern cloud alternative is developed. Be careful what you wish for.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Police_National_Computer
> That should be written on a poster that is put on each desk of each employee of each car/washing machine/fridge/television manufacturer.
And consumer. Very few people would use 50 year old devices even if they were/are perfectly functional.
Plenty of people buy secondhand equipment. Manufacturers want to stop that; spare parts are hard to get or needlessly expensive, and manuals are woefully incomplete or nonexistent.
I've contracted for someone whose customers thought so. (My job involved making stuff work with without an important part from a defunct vendor.)
Their costs really did increase all the time. Not needlessly, despite what some people thought: their cost per spare part really did grow quite a lot, as the number needed per year decreased and the fixed overhead slowly increased.
Speaking as a writer, I would use an IBM Model M keyboard in a heartbeat. Made in 1985, so 40 years old.
I have a few of those, I love them. They just work perfectly.
My sunbeam automatic toaster is working just fine thank you very much. :-)
I found one in a thrift store and I was so excited until I realized that they wanted $150 for it... even local thrift stores know what they have now
Alec? Is that you?
To be fair, space is quite the decent preservation chamber.
There should be a list of manufacturers who build durable consumer electronics.
I have a Sharp carousel microwave oven that is 40 years old and works fine.
The "secret" solution is it was one of the last years made in Japan, not China.
I just move it from apartment to apartment over the years while everything else breaks.
It’s beyond my average brain how it’s possible at all for a machine that far away to get data to us.
Wow: Triggering the protection system a second time turned off the regular radio:
"While the S-band uses less power, Voyager 1 had not used it to communicate with Earth since 1981. It uses a different frequency than the X-band transmitters signal is significantly fainter. The flight team was not certain the S-band could be detected at Earth due to the spacecraft’s distance, but engineers with the Deep Space Network were able to find it."
Heros, both those who made the S-band radio and those who managed to retrieve the signal.
Finally, a “breaks one’s silence” headline that’s not a celebrity posting something on social media.
You could say that Voyager is a celebrity. It even does cameos on sci-fi movies from time to time.
What was the comment chain on that post about layoffs earlier?
“It’s been an adventure…”
“An important message from Voyager…”
But I really need to know who Brad Pitt is endorsing before I head into the voting booth
(thinking aloud/voice in my head) If 'those things' are recharged by sunlight, I wonder how will they get the energy to continue transmitting (assuming they have whatever source AND solar panels - for when the fuel runs out and they can't catch any sunlight?)
my dialogue with ChatGPT:
That's the problem, they won't have enough energy to transmit anymore.
The Voyager probes are powered entirely from their RTGs, they have no solar panels nor batteries[1]. So if the power output from the RTGs drops below the level needed to power the transmitter, Voyager can't talk to us anymore. There's no batteries that can be recharged and no solar panels it ever drew power from.
The exciting part from this discovery is the potential to keep talking to Voyager longer than we thought. If the S-band transmitter uses less power and we're still able to detect that signal, we may be able to communicate with the probes with lower RTG outputs than we initially thought. Though at that point, if the radio is the only thing still running and there's no instruments operating, the usefulness is probably pretty low at that point.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_1#Power, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Voyager_2#Power
On such a distance solar panels won't make any difference. Sun looks like just a very bright star from that far.
I wonder how long we could make an RTG last today
Fundamentally there isn't any change in the underlying physics. You're limited by the half life of the isotope, so you either choose a longer-lived isotope (which actually may be even harder post Cold War as much of the ideal isotopes were byproducts of nuclear weapons manufacturing) or launch a bigger RTG than you need so you have enough power later on in the mission.
I think the more interesting thing is its suddenly become so much cheaper to put things in orbit, we could simply put a larger satellite with a larger nuclear battery out there.
wiki has the answer, ballpark is around twice as long, and they're using this new design for an upcoming probe
> Voyagers 1 and 2 have been flying for more than 47 years and are the only two spacecraft to operate in interstellar space.