oops voyager

Nasa has lost contact with its Voyager 2 probe billions of miles away from Earth after sending it the wrong command

it hopes communication will resume when the probe is due to reset in October.

**LINK**

Good job someone thought to include that periodic reset !!

MichaelG.

How can you send something like that a wrong command without checking it a million times???

We seem to have raw talent for that.

SOP for spacecraft (near and far) pretty much from day 1: if you haven't heard from us for xxx, do a reset of the communication system (and perhaps some other things).

If you still don't hear from us there's this bunch of other stuff ...

The error made the probe turn its antenna away from Earth!. Luckily it seems they were still able to receive enough signals from it to know it is still in "good health" (sayeth the News!) so are hoping to be able to turn it round again.

It's the equivalent of the "Oh sh*t" moment when you press return on the computer keyboard without double checking what you are about to tell the computer to do.

Did that once when trying to add a back-up hard drive to my PC and lost all access to the original hard drive, which of course contained the Windows start-up and files and tools. So I had to recover it via MS-DOS and the BIOS.

A computer expert could not sort it out, but I managed to get it all back. The data had not gone, just that the computer had "forgotten" that it had a hard drive. I was eventually able to jog its memory and get it to look and find the drive. All was back to normal after that.

The people at NASA must be in a terrible state about Voyager - I would hate to be in their shoes right now. I hope the dish panning mechanism on the spacecraft doesn't jam when it tries to motor the dish back.

Probably one of those "Are You Sure You Want to Reconfigure the Dish Array Thingy?"

Yes No

There is of course no "maybe" or "I will think about it later" option !

.

What you describe doesn’t read like a ‘periodic reset’ to me

… they currently seem to be waiting for a pre-scheduled in the calendar reset to take place, not some logically-triggered one..

MichaelG.

Are these the same NASA controllers who direct manned space flights. 🤔. Dave W

Come on chaps....

Most of us here might have had academic and working careers very different from Engineering, but we still like to think ourselves "Engineers", so let's not stoop to the level of the "red-top" newspapers.

If you stood on top of a step ladder and tried to pee in a bucket at the foot of it, I guess most of us would miss. To be able to control something 12.3 billion miles away that was launched 46 years ago is a magnificent achievement.

Bob

The missus would say I don't need a step ladder

The craft was sent off so long ago the original staff crew would have been replaced and along with the knowledge of the crafts specific command structure. A newbi comes along and assumes things so errors occur!

I would be very surprised (at Clive's implication about NASA, not Mrs. Ady's complaint about 'Im Indoors!).

Surely all the specification, operations, commands, etc. would be compiled into hand-books, probably both .pdf and real paper?

Also although it's very likely most of the original team would have retired by now,. that would be a slow, steady progress so keeping continuation of accumulated experience.

I have had no sight of any NASA documents but do have some experience with using both Hewlett-Packard and RN-issue instrument-operating manuals so would envisage NASA having something similar. These assume the reader understands the subject, but are written in very clear, logical and unambiguous styles. A bit like a Haynes Manual but more formally set out - and a darn sight easier to follow than a certain booklet with orange printing on a white cover!

Anyway, anyone can make a mistake. Just look at the spare holes in my steam-lorry chassis! Though for something like a space flight you'd expect tight error-traps and command-verifying.

The point perhaps is not that someone in NASA made a mistake - whilst Voyager's flight is extremely costly and future information-gathering lost by an operating-error would be serious scientifically, no-one's lives are at stake.

As SpeedyBuilder says, it is a magnificent achievement that something man-made, nearly 50 years old and so far away is still working and still controllable at all without any physical overhaul since being placed atop a rocket. It will be very sad if Voyager disappears from the world's radio-telescopes prematurely by irretrievably facing the wrong way, but human error or not, no human will have been harmed.

Whatever actually went wrong I hope they can correct, and 'Voyager' will still be 'phoning home for as long as she can before vanishing for ever from radio-telescope receiving-range.

There was still one guy still working from the Apollo program on telly a few years ago (4 years?)

He was in his 70s

Each day he got the reading from a gadget (laser?) on a lonely hill in the USA pointed at a target left by Neil Armstrong (or his buddies) on the lunar surface

It was to measure the exact distance between the earth and the moon each day

They're not really separable. You don't necessarily want to do a reset simply because it's scheduled on Jan 5 (or whatever) if at that time the spacecraft is functioning as expected and you have good communications. It won't achieve anything and actually represents a risk.

Just to point out that the article mentioned "wrong data" which is not necessarily synonymous with "error" (as in misteak).

As a - perhaps rather contrived - example: if it was know that the antenna pointing was drifting it might not necessarily be obvious in which direction. You could then send a signal to inch it left or right and see if the signal strengthens or weakens. That might be a coin-toss at that point and there is a 50/50 chance of sending the wrong data. You could lose it at that point if it was on the edge of signal loss anyway.

Also lets not forget that this spacecraft is way (way, way) beyond its design life. It has long since repaid its investment; power is limited and much of the onboard technology has been shut down. Minimal funds are being provided to keep this going and only then because of a lot of lobbying by a few interested parties. It's more a question of when not if it's going to quit.

Edited By Peter Greene on 02/08/2023 19:30:46

As someone who in one career has spent many years pointing mobile 1.5m 12GHz dish antennas at geostationary satellites, or terrestrial microwave dish antennas at other terrestrial dish antennas 60 miles away; and in another career flying modern airliners, which can nevertheless show navigational position errors of up to a nautical mile after a flight; it completely boggles my brain that NASA can keep Voyager's communication dish antenna panned to the Earth at this range at all.

Absolutely mind blowing ! I hope they get it back, and I feel for them right now.

It's bad enough when a part is reworked or scrapped, it's a whole nother thing when the mistake is broadcast around the world.