Voyager 2 is programmed to reset its orientation multiple times each year to keep its antenna pointing at Earth. The next reset is due on 15 October, which Nasa says "should enable communication to resume".
this post was submitted on 01 Aug 2023
134 points (99.3% liked)
Science
13150 readers
33 users here now
Subscribe to see new publications and popular science coverage of current research on your homepage
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
You have to appreciate the resilience of the design, though, it says the probe has an automatic reset every few months so it will hopefully recover in October when the next reset occurs
Who hasn't pushed bad code to production?
Imagine executing the command, immediately realising you fucked up and having to wait 36 hours for the response back from the probe
"7373636272811891 rows affected"
Shit....
"lie down on floor
try not to cry
cry a lot"
yeah, bad code to production, not so much, fix with SQL, uh huh...
It's always an intern doing this shit
I'd hate to be the person who was supposed to review it..
shit
I find it stressful enough doing an update on a remote server (where there's someone in support who can reboot the box if it all goes wrong). It's got to be something else to send commands to a spacecraft that's now light hours away. It's not just that you can't exactly go out and troubleshoot the hardware, it's also that the ping time is rather extreme so you won't know for hours if you've screwed up or not!
If the probe is finally dead i.e. we can no longer communicate with it, I feel like it would be a fittingly ignoble end.
It'll correct itself it October, so hopefully not the end yet.