Mark Megahan
Some guys over at NASA made one of those careless clicking mistakes that Ctrl-Z wouldn’t fix. It started a fast game of Galactic hide and seek with the Voyager 2 space probe. They weren’t too nervous about losing contact because the 50 year old robot was programmed by boomers. Ones who were obsessed with the concept, “never underestimate the power of human stupidity.”
Idiot proofing to NASA rescue
An unidentified NASA engineer generated one of those annoying “ID 10-T” errors recently by giving a very literal minded robot a set of flawed instructions. By now, Voyager 2 is somewhere around 20 billion kilometers from home, after flying through deep space for the past half a century. In other words, it’s not real easy to get to.
The engineer gave it a clear set of instructions which it executed flawlessly. “Point its antenna away from Earth and await further orders.” The obvious flaw in that logic is it won’t be able to get any orders because it’s not looking at Earth. Oops. What now?
As the guy who tapped out the fatal command sat there stunned and wondering if he just ended the entire NASA mission with a single line of code, his boss told him not to stress too much.
As long as there wasn’t anything physically wrong with the probe, it would fix the mistake on its own, from the far end. Surprisingly, they didn’t need to wait that long.
Just in case Voyager didn’t figure out the problem and self-adjust a repair, the team of NASA engineers went on an unexpected game of galactic hide and seek.
While the boomers may have programmed in lots of fail-safe circuits, the youngsters invented some really cool new gear. Including the Deep Space Network. It regularly “communicates with our mechanical explorers.” Before the command team knew it, DSN “picked up the Not Dead Yet signal, and then got full service back in short order.”
Two reasons for reliability
There are two reasons, The Register writes, “Voyager 2 can call home from the edge of the Solar System more reliably than a kid in college.” The first is that “the spacecraft combines the over-engineering of the past with the flexibility of the new.”
Boomers working for NASA built the hard wiring but all the software is patch-able on the fly. Because modern space equipment uses much lower power communication systems, DSN had no trouble finding Voyager 2’s high gain antenna.
The second reason was boomer paranoia. Both Voyager probes “are designed to do a periodic realignment of their orientation by means of the Sun and the star Canopus – neither of which is going to randomly throw out dodgy instructions.” Another favorable aspect is ordinary geometry.
“The basic idea is that if you point your high-gain antenna at the Sun from that sort of distance, the Earth will be in very close proximity. Clever, simple, reliable.” Just how NASA likes things. Default program is “assume the worst, go into safe mode, and find home.”
Losing Voyager 2 now would be a huge blow to science because the outdated equipment is literally on the cutting edge of solar research.
The Voyager probes are considered “the vanguard” of what NASA calls their “Heliophysics Mission fleet,” reporting “conditions at the interface between the Sun’s environment and the interstellar medium that raise more questions than answers.” As good science is supposed to.
