Curious, has Voyager 1 brought in any data in recent years that is scientifically meaningful? Not to put down the efforts of keeping it alive, I love that. Just wonder how much of its task is "done".
I think there’s going to be more than a few people feeling a little emotional when the days that the Voyagers go dark come. What magnificent machines.
Amazing that this spacecraft has been operating for nearly half a century.
If anybody wants further context, here's an excellent paper on the status of the Voyager mission as of 2016, written by one of the engineers at JPL. It has an overview of what all the instruments on Voyager do and everything the team had done to keep the mission going as of that point. https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/VIMChallenges.pdf I also highly recommend the documentary "It's Quieter in the Twilight" which is about the entire Voyager team and their efforts to keep the program operational.
> the sequence of commands to shut down the instrument will take 23 or so hours to reach the spacecraft
Closing in on one light day!
> Engineers are confident that shutting down the LECP will give Voyager 1 about a year of breathing room. They are using the time to finalize a more ambitious energy-saving fix for both Voyagers they call “the Big Bang,” which is designed to further extend Voyager operations. The idea is to swap out a group of powered devices all at once — hence the nickname — turning some things off and replacing them with lower-power alternatives to keep the spacecraft warm enough to continue gathering science data.
> The team will implement the Big Bang on Voyager 2 first, which has a little more power to spare and is closer to Earth, making it the safer test subject. Tests are planned for May and June 2026. If they go well, the team will attempt the same fix on Voyager 1 no sooner than July. If it works, there is even a chance that Voyager 1’s LECP could be switched back on.
Voyager 1 has only a year left otherwise? Also, what low-powered alternatives are there? Is there that much redundancy? I'd love to know what their idea and plan are?
Also,
> For Voyager 1, the LECP was next on that list. The team shut off the LECP on Voyager 2 in March 2025.
Why? Voyager 2 has more power to spare, per the prior quote.
> Why? Voyager 2 has more power to spare, per the prior quote.
Because Voyager 2 has different equipment active. It still has the Cosmic Ray Subsystem active.
Imagine deploying your bug fix and having to wait two days to find out if it worked!
An old timer once told me about how he would read his printouts, make new punch cards, send them over to the main office, someone would put the new cards into the system the next morning, and then read the printouts on the day after that to see if his code worked or not.
Aprocryphal, but I've heard that at Oracle, when pushing an update to their database software, it'll be maybe a week before the tests complete on it (after it reaches the front of the queue of course). I couldn't even.
HPC systems often still use batch scheduling systems where (even for a fast job) you may very well get your results the next day (or whenever your job actually runs and completes.)
It is annoying to find out that your job failed to run or exited immediately due to a typo or other minor mistake.
Of course ML training (and scientific computing) jobs can take weeks or months to complete. Checkpoint and restart features are important because node or other failures are almost inevitable.
I've had those times in swift in a terrestrial setting!