For example, have all the digital electronics be reprogrammable gate arrays.
> Please note that in IE, unlike in Firefox, if the developer tools are not active, window.console is undefined and calling console.log() will break. Always protect your calls with window.console && console.log('stuff');
https://stackoverflow.com/questions/2656730/how-can-i-use-co...
I honestly can't think of a more difficult debugging scenario.
Voyagers are sent commands using the DSN, which is in high demand: https://arstechnica.com/space/2023/08/nasas-artemis-i-missio...
They need big radios (the biggest!) because the signal strength coming back from the probes these days are very weak, only one-tenth of a billion-trillionth of a watt.
That would actually be fine, because you can do encryption in software. So you wouldn't need to keep any physical artifacts from the 1970s around.
That said, only America, China, Europe, India, Japan and Russia have deep space networks and none of them have anything to gain from investing the resources into trying to harm Voyager. Even with weak encryption it's likely difficult to collect enough samples to be able to break it and even once it's broken you still need to figure out a valid set of commands to send to achive your goal.
It’s doubtful that there’s enough processing or memory headroom for any decent encryption.
You’d have to not only add decryption routines, a key (even 128 bits is a lot!), and that’s another point of failure.
As we know one of the memory modules already corrupted, so if encryption was implemented, chances are the Voyager would be a brick now.
I wonder why they chose volatile memory: Were there performance demands that required it? How much did non-volatile memory cost back then?
By the late 70s the modern understanding of software development was taking hold. They wanted to be able to download arbitrary programs, as needed, in flight. And so instead of having it mostly in ROM, the Voyager computers are like any other general purpose computer and all their main memory is RAM.
Updating a live system in RAM isn't as risky as it might sound when you consider there are three different computers on board, each dually redundant, serving a supervisor role for the other two.
If you can round up the money for the spacecraft.
We can boost from Jupiter into deep space whenever we want. Pioneer 10 reached a similar speed just fine, but we don't talk about it a lot because it broke.
Article: https://www.universetoday.com/148241/want-the-fastest-solar-...
Paper: https://arxiv.org/pdf/2009.12659.pdf
Interview with paper’s author: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=W-E83lC-eN0
There’s not much to investigate going out every direction, the little science they’re still doing is tracking the size of the suns influence, and that will be about the same in any direction.
Another “grand tour” of the solar system during an alignment with modern sensors and cameras would be awesome though
It’s so hard to imagine. As a 90s kid the photos the Voyagers sent back were prominent in my childhood.
The FDS memory seems to be CMOS, which was apparently novel at the time of launch[0]. I suppose that means it's static RAM. I have a notion that at least some CMOS SRAM came in 8-bit wide chips, storing 1-4 Kb. So that would imply total RAM of between 20Kb and 80Kb. I haven't managed to track down many definite numbers or facts.
It's programmed in FORTRAN77; it's a very long time since I was adjacent to FORTRAN, but as I recall, all variables were global. I'm sure it's tricky to write code that works even if there's a hole in physical memory; but I guess the absence of heaps and caches must help a lot.
[0] https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/news/voyager-mission-annive...
See https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/14/voyager_1_not_dead/ (discussion: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39704914)
https://www.cnn.com/2024/03/14/world/voyager-1-communication... (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39726235)
The update in this new article is that they have determined that a memory chip has gone bad.
