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Posted on 09/02/2007 11:24:38 AM PDT by sionnsar
sea_stuart writes with a story from the Tidbinbilla space tracking station, outside Canberra, Australia. It is still communicating with the two Voyager spacecraft 30 years after they were launched and 18 years after Voyager 2 passed close by Neptune. Here's a little background on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.
"The bank of computers that would look at home in black-and-white episodes of Doctor Who cannot be junked... [T]he 1970s hardware is now our world's only means of chatting with two robot pioneers exploring the solar system's outer limits. Today Voyager 1 is humanity's most remote object, 15.5 billion kilometers from the sun. Voyager 2 is 12.5 billion kilometers from it. Both continue beaming home reports, but now they are space-age antiques. 'The Voyager technology is so outmoded,' said Tidbinbilla's spokesman, Glen Nagle, 'we have had to maintain heritage equipment to talk to them.'"
Oh sure, no one can figure out a way to interface modern computers with the 1970’s technology on the spacecraft? You must be kidding me.
I don’t think it’s a technology thing. I think it’s more of a cost thing. The point is not the hardware, but rather the software. The infrastructure is in place now, why spend millions of dollars upgrading it when the probes could stop sending data any day?
What’s more amazing is that we’re building spacecraft that can last as long as they are. Look at the Mars Exploration Rovers.
Oh for God's sake. Give me ten minutes with a microcontroller and I'll hook it up for you. Whoever wrote this knows squat about computers.
Home computers were a distant dream. ... September 5, 1977
They were hardly a distant dream; my first issue of Byte magazine (Vol 1 No 1) had arrived two years earlier.
This is total BS. The very reason they are still transmitting signals is the premise that ET will someday pick it up and investigate. Are they saying that ET needs 1970’s computers?
Altair 8800 came out in 1975. Tandy, Apple, and Commodore released home computers in 1977. By 1977, there were probably thousands of kids playing with computers they got for Christmas.
I don’t know why they even bother trying to upgrade the interface, when they know that in 200 years it’s going to be interfaced with that alien probe, and almost destroy the USS Enterprise.
That was Voyager 6!
“. . . and almost destroy the USS Enterprise.”
Not to mention Earth.
Go for it, Scotty... ;)
Well, yes.
Try sending Morse code by your PC to “somebody” with an original telegraph receiving key/clicker. The two technologies are common (digital signals “encrypted/translated” by specific codes into a common written or spoken language, but the physical transmittal and reception need to be physically hooked together for that application.
Or, try playing an old DOS-based/5” floppy disk PC flight game or calculation program on today’s PC: the speeds and protocols are so different that even if the floppy could be read, the program can’t be played because the machine speeds are too fast for the game to be played.
Besides, you're talking NASA here. What do you think they are, rocket scientists or something?
No. All the rocket scientist are at MDA.
Oh, how little you know...
Didn't you hear about the guy that came back from the future, because the fate of the world depended on a specific piece of 1980s vintage IBM pc hardware?
He made all sorts of posting on the internet while he was here in this time.
I can't quite remember, whoops, look up "John Titor" to get the whole "story".
Well, that and NASA wants to know when intersetllar space begins.
” ... 8” floppy disk ...”
Better yet, how about a nine track tape? God what a pain in the @$$ those were. And slow, ...
Just wondering how someone can come back from the future when the future doesn’t exist yet - it only happens microsecond to microsecond ... as I type this what I wrote was in the past and when you read this it’ll be in the past too ... you can go back in time (supposedly) but you can’t go to someplace that doesn’t exist yet .... but then, what do I know .. :)
According to Parmenides time is impossible.
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