Okay, you may have read how the NASA chaps accidentally asked Voyager 2 to shift its antenna alignment two degrees, and how contact was lost for a couple of days.
I was browsing the Hairy Elephant Place, and came across this interesting testament to planning and foresight:
The engineers who designed the #Voyager probes half a century ago even thought of the possibility that a wrong sequence of commands may point the antenna dish away from earth (like someone did a couple of days ago).
And they implemented a self-adjusting mechanism that a few times a year scans the positions of a few known stars to infer the position of the earth, and point back the antenna in the right direction.
50 years later, these wonderful machines are still working, tens of billions of km away from earth, with only 69 KB of RAM, and even a wrong sequence of commands won't put them out of use, while nowadays 4 GB of RAM aren't even enough to start VsCode or IntelliJ.
The more I understand how they were designed, the more I feel like an early Medieval engineer looking at the Pantheon or other marvels of Roman architecture. Some amazing skills, knowledge and attention to details have been lost from that generation to ours.
Greedy fuckers cannot self-regulate.
Prove me wrong.
I see this all the time as a software developer.. Rather than understand how to correctly optimise, for example, their SQL statements and indexes they simply push more power at the servers to compensate, wastefully spending 'other peoples money'.
This is partly due to things like entity framework that abstract people away from what is happening underneath and resulting in them never really understanding enough about the underlying technology to do things efficiently.
"Now this is the command: Do to the doer to make him do." - The Eloquent Peasant (2040–1650 BCE)
“Religion the protector of the well fed and consoler of the hungry.” - Mikhail Bakunin
Nasa is back in full contact with its lost Voyager 2 probe months earlier than expected, the space agency said.
In July a wrong command was made to the spacecraft, sent to explore space in 1977, changing its position and severing contact.
A signal was picked up on Tuesday but thanks to an "interstellar shout" - a powerful instruction - its antenna is now back facing Earth.
Nasa had originally pinned hopes on the spacecraft resetting itself in October.
It took 37 hours for mission controllers to figure out if the interstellar command had worked as Voyager 2 is billions of miles away from 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.
