• FlatFootFox@lemmy.world
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    6 months ago

    I still cannot believe NASA managed to re-establish a connection with Voyager 1.

    That scene from The Martian where JPL had a hardware copy of Pathfinder on Earth? That’s not apocryphal. NASA keeps a lot of engineering models around for a variety of purposes including this sort of hardware troubleshooting.

    It’s a practice they started after Voyager. They shot that patch off into space based off of old documentation, blueprints, and internal memos.

    • nxdefiant@startrek.website
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      6 months ago

      Imagine scrolling back in the Slack chat 50 years to find that one thing someone said about how the chip bypass worked.

        • jaybone@lemmy.world
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          6 months ago

          This is why slack is bullshit. And discord. We should all go back to email. It can be stored and archived and organized and get off my lawn.

    • BearOfaTime@lemm.ee
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      6 months ago

      I realize the Voyager project may not be super well funded today (how is it funded, just general NASA funds now?), just wondering what they have hardware-wise (or ever had). Certainly the Voyager system had to have precursors (versions)?

      Or do they have a simulator of it today - we’re talking about early 70’s hardware, should be fairly straightforward to replicate in software? Perhaps some independent geeks have done this for fun? (I’ve read of some old hardware such as 8088 being replicated in software because some geeks just like doing things like that).

      I have no idea how NASA functions with old projects like this, and I’m surely not saying I have better ideas - they’ve probably thought of a million more ways to validate what they’re doing.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
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      6 months ago

      To add to the metal, the blueprints include the blueprints for the processor.

      https://hackaday.com/2024/05/06/the-computers-of-voyager/

      They don’t use a microprocessor like anything today would, but a pile of chips that provide things like logic gates and counters. A grown up version of https://gigatron.io/

      That means “written in assembly” means “written in a bespoke assembly dialect that we maybe didn’t document very well, or the hardware it ran on, which was also bespoke”.