this post was submitted on 24 Oct 2023
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208
NASA's interstellar Voyager probes get software updates beamed from 12 billion miles away (www.space.com)
submitted 1 year ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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NASA's interstellar Voyager probes get software updates beamed from 12 billion miles away::A few updates to the two Voyager spacecraft should extend the space explorers' lives so they can continue adventuring in the cosmos.

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[–] [email protected] 69 points 1 year ago (4 children)

Any IT worker who has ever updated a remote system, knowing that if something goes wrong you're facing a 12 hour drive to fix it, fully understands the sheer butt clenching terror that those NASA engineers experienced for the almost full day they had to wait between deploying the update and finding out if they broke anything.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

More than a full day. It would take the signal about 18.5 hrs to get to Voyager. We'd then have to wait another 18.5 hrs for the signal to get back so we could know if it worked.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Imagine driving 18 light hours. 😬 How long would that even take??

[–] [email protected] 1 points 1 year ago

At 70 mph, that would take 172,444,276 hrs. That's about 19,635 years non-stop.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 1 year ago

I recently watched It's Quieter in the Twilight, a fascinating documentary about the shrinking and aging team of engineers at the JPL still working on Voyager.

[–] [email protected] 9 points 1 year ago

I messed up a server config and was terrified I had to spend an extra hour for travel. I can't imagine the pressure those NASA engineers have.

[–] [email protected] 4 points 1 year ago

Oof yeah. When I update a Cisco firewall remotely it'll go offline for around 30 minutes to around two hours where it is completely unreachable. In the time window I'm desperately watching a continuous ping to see if it comes back up okay. If it does, I'm done. If it doesn't, it means I need to go into work and probably spend several hours on the phone trying to fix it.

Can't imagine the stress of trying to update something that is almost 20 light hours away.