539
As a software engineer I feel for the person who accidentally sent the wrong value and caused an icon to be offline, potentially forever.
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
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It's not going to be offline forever. It'll reorient in a couple months. It was designed to do this when comms are lost. Still a little scary though.
This assumes their understanding of what caused the problem is accurate.
Should it be ever so slightly imprecise, it could mean we lose contact forever.
This is one of those things that sounds meaningful, but can be said about literally any problem in any system. Not all knowledge requires the same level of precision for confidence.
If the engineers at NASA who are familiar with the system say this is a known error state that will be fixed the next time the system designed to correct it fires on its set schedule, there's not a whole lot added by saying sure, but what if they're wrong?
It's just restating the table stakes of existence.
But what if I, armchair scientist on Lemmy, sees a flaw in the plan of some of the greatest engineers in the world? Doesn't the world deserve to know what I think about the communications system I just became aware of today?
Lol. The knee-jerk contrarianism online really gets under my skin, especially when it's towards experts.
Like yeah, sometimes experts are wrong or systems don't behave as expected. But framing that as some sort of erudite insight really bugs me.
"I hope the recovery system works!" doesn't need to be rewritten as "Mmm yes. But what these engineers haven't considered is the possibility that they are wrong".
I had a laugh at this line:
It's just restating the table stakes of existence.
Brilliantly put. It's like saying to a stranger on an airplane, "If these pilots don't know how to fly, we are gonna die!"
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I don't think I'm prepared to lose another space robot.
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They're going to have a very tough time sleeping between now and mid-October.
There's actually a group of alien teenagers following it and occasionally giving it a spin or nudge, just to fuck with us. They think its hilarious.
Fucking Neutrinos.
It'll reconnect and align back the next time it pings back to Earth. It was designed for this kind of contingency. It's very unlikely its lost forever.
What a great project. Really puts perspective on what can be accomplished with public funds and vision. Meanwhile shit like Starlink exists and lasts maybe a couple of years. I wonder whyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyyy???
As much as I’d like to agree, those projects have very different goals and constraints.
As much as I hate Musk and most of his idiot projects, Starlink isn't that bad of an idea. Traditional SATCOM internet is more expensive for shittier service. From what I've read, Starlink has been fairly reliable, not overly expensive, and performance is pretty solid. Sure, in areas that already have "excellent" terrestrial internet providers available, it is pretty useless. But for rural areas, it's a godsend.
Because they're low orbit communication satellites that require a lot of fuel to maintain said orbit, and are designed to deorbit pretty quickly so as to not pollute LEO with junk?
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Have you tried shouting at it?
Or turning it off, waiting a bit, and back on again?
Wonder if we could ping it off one of the other satellites we have around other planets to get a message out to it. Fingers crossed it's back in contact by October and we don't have to try weird shit though
I would imagine 2° at 12 billion miles means it's almost certainly not pointing at anything man-made anymore, but I'm also not an astrophysicist so ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Being that far out I don't even think we could go out and fix it anymore
Lol no we most certainly cannot go out and fix it.
And even if it was pointed at random human equipment it’s so far away that you need a very special radio and antenna; not just any old satellite is necessarily going to do the trick. I think the signal strength is around -196db iirc so incredibly faint, and The antennas they use to communicate with voyager are massive.
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If I read it correctly, the probe checks periodically, and if it loses contact, it uses the location of known stars to point its antenna back towards the Earth. If that doesn't work, it's gone.
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