CAPTCHAs are getting out of hand these days.

#programming

“We notice you are using an ad blocker…”

Yes, and I notice you are using a few dozen trackers. Turn off the trackers and I will look at your ads. Until then, we are at an impasse.

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.

Voyager 2 is temporarily out of contact with the Earth. On Friday, #NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said that commands recently sent to the distant spacecraft inadvertently caused its antenna to point two degrees from Earth. #Voyager2 thus cannot receive commands from Earth, nor can the data it transmits be received on Earth. #JPL expects the situation to resolve in October when the spacecraft performs a pre-planned reset of its primary antenna, aligning it with Earth again.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasa-mission-update-voyager-2-communications-pause