The grad student who sent Voyager the crappy commands
this post was submitted on 04 Aug 2023
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By Grabthar's Hammer, I'm fucking relieved
He was so good in this movie. When he dies inside taking two tries to say 'what a savings' i can feel the pain.
I'm so sad he died. I want to see more of Alan Rickman forever.
First day at work.
"Send the command to rotate the antenna."
"Ok, sent"
"But first, make sure the Arf322 is set to 'auto'."
"Wait!? NO!"
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I’d recommend anyone interested in the Voyager program to check out “It’s Quieter in the Twilight”. A film about the people involved in the project and how they’ve dedicated their lives to make it happen.
Pretty crazy that it takes over 17 hours just to send a signal all the way to Voyager 2.
Each way. It would take 34 hours to get confirmation that your signal has been received.
And Voyager 1 is even further away.
Relevant XKCD: 
I wish we were ready for another Carl Sagan. If we are then I'm waiting to be awed.
A casual post on the interwebs about losing/gaining communication with an object that uses less power than my NVIDIA 2080 beyond the gravitational pull of our Sun.
Lawl. Fuck that. Crazy. People looking for a miracle well just read the fucking article. Mankind can do amazing things when we just put our minds to it.
(Pre-edit: I was thinking I should use the ever wise internet to verify claims about gravitational pull. I'm 100% wrong but the point still stands. Damn it we can do anything if we just agree and put our minds to it. [From: NASA Despite the probe entering interstellar space, Voyager 2, along with Voyager 1, have not left the solar system and won't for quite a while, NASA said. The space agency said Voyager 2 will leave the Oort Cloud, "a collection of small objects that are still under the influence of the Sun’s gravity," in approximately 30,000 years, so it is still being influenced by the Sun's gravity to some extent.])
Are we sure it is the same thing? Alien-in-the-middle attack succeeded... 😁
interstellar shout
Seems like they haven't read the "remembrance of Earth's past" trilogy, otherwise they might have known better than to shout into the universe
Realistically, the universe is very unlikely to operate under the scenario that series depicts, because if an alien species existed with sufficient technology to wipe out other intelligent species from a distance, and desired to take out any other species they knew about like the whole dark forest idea implies, then they shouldnt need active proof of intelligence like an attempt at communication, it should be simpler to just look at planets for signs of planetary biospheres, in their atmospheres for example, and launch whatever planet-sterilizing weapons they planned to use at lifebearing planets before anything intelligent ever evolves. If they get powerful enough (which given the age of the universe they probably should be, it would seem fairly unlikely for all spacefairing aliens in a given area of space to have come about within even the same million years, even if sci-fi likes to portray it this way) then they dont even need to look for biosignatures, they could just preemptively attack every planet in the galaxy with relativistic projectiles. There are a lot of planets, sure, but a finite amount, and they'd have a lot of time to do this in. Hiding should be essentially impossible, because your location is almost certainly compromised before you even exist. Given that we exist, this implies that nobody in this general side of the galaxy behaves this way, either because there are no species in this region with the capacity to do this, or because they do not behave in such a hostile manner. Further, a species that does have the capacity to operate this way should at least consider that, if other intelligent species exist with any frequency, then it is very unlikely that they are the first intelligent species to exist, and therefore that as their territory or general area of contact and influence expands, they will inevitably encounter some civilization more powerful than theirs. When they do encounter that more advanced civilization, then having a history of destroying every intelligent species they find immediately is not going to give them a very good impression, and probably would get them seen as a threat, far more than they would if they were not overtly hostile to everything they encounter.
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The fact that we can maintain communication with something so far away boggles my fucking mind. Technology is some good shit, sad that NASA keeps getting funded less and the military keeps getting funded more.
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Based on comments and stuff I read, isn’t this sooner than expected? I thought I read somewhere it wouldn’t be until October until contact would be possibly back.
They used a powerful, specially focused transmitter and got lucky
They planned on trying a command to fix it but they didn’t expect it to work and said that October when the system reset happened was the best shot. Seems like the command ended up working though.
Yes! Very glad they were able to reestablish contact. It makes me happy knowing that both Voyagers are still out there sending useful data still after all these years. Absolutely incredible. I think Carl Sagan would also be very pleased.
This is the best summary I could come up with:
Nasa is back in full contact with its lost Voyager 2 probe months earlier than expected, the space agency said.
A signal was picked up on Tuesday but thanks to an "interstellar shout" - a powerful instruction - its antenna is now back facing Earth.
Staff used the "highest-power transmitter" to send a message to the spacecraft and timed it to be sent during "the best conditions" so the antenna lined up with the command, Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd told AFP.
After communications were lost, the probe had been unable to receive commands or send back data to Nasa's Deep Space Network - an array of giant radio antennas across the world.
On Monday, the space agency said its huge dish in Australia's capital, Canberra, was trying to detect any stray signals from Voyager 2.
The probes were designed to take advantage of a rare alignment of outer planets, which occurs about every 176 years, to explore Jupiter and Saturn.
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