Voyager’s 15 billion-mile software update has been successful!

 

 Disclaimer:

The information provided on this blog is for general informational purposes only. All content, including text, images, graphics, and information, contained on or available through this blog is for general information purposes only.The owner of this blog makes no representations as to the accuracy or completeness of any information on this site or found by following any link on this site. The owner will not be liable for any errors or omissions in this information nor for the availability of this information. The owner will not be liable for any losses, injuries, or damages from the display or use of this information.The views and opinions expressed on this blog are purely the bloggers' own. Any product claim, statistic, quote, or other representation about a product or service should be verified with the manufacturer, provider, or party in question.This blog does not contain any content which might present a conflict of interest.

Wrong assumption that make alien existence-

source- parimal space

So friends, as science and space lovers know, NASA launched a spacecraft in 1977 whose name was Voyager 1, and perhaps you know that this spacecraft also had a golden disk in which there was information about the Earth and our human evolutions.
 There were also sounds of humans and animals, but do you know that NASA has recently installed a software update in Voyager 1, which is 163 AU (24.4 billion km; 15.2 billion mi) so far from the Earth? But the question is: how did NASA do this with such pinpoint accuracy without any problems? So, friends, this is what we will know about today's topic. You will also know how NASA people did this without any problem. One interesting thing is that this spacecraft runs on 70's technology and has only 69 KB of memory storage. After all, NASA people managed to do this in such a capacity. How did they do this? And friends, as you know, this space is so useful that in today's time even a photo is stored in the MB's. Also, you would not know that the mission of Voyager 1 ended in the 1980's when he took photographs of Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn's moon, Titan, and sent them. Now the mission was over, and the scientists who were involved in that mission were also 70 or 80 years old. Do you know that those team members were called old people? Even after being launched, there was no permission to have a retire; they could only have one if Voyager 1 or 2. Retire; after all, what is there in this mission that NASA is keeping its team members under wraps? Is Voyager sending any such information from space to NASA people, which is a top secret for NASA? Well, let us know about it clearly. It will happen when we know what happened to Voyager 1. 45 years after its launch, NASA wants to update it. In fact, on August 25, 2012, after completely studying Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 exited the solar system. And by stepping into interstellar space, he started a new journey—that is, he started a journey outside the solar system. In this journey, the spacecraft was sending new data to NASA, but after a few years in 2022, suddenly on NASA's computers, zeros and ones from Voyager appeared. Now NASA people will be happy after seeing these signals because they were thinking that the golden record disc that they have sent has gotten into the hands of some alien civilization, and they want to decode that data and make contact with us, but a complete After a year, this signal After decoding, they came to know that it was nothing, as they thought, and that something else was involved in these strange signals. See the explanation later.

source- parimal space

Voyager 1 spacecraft working
 

source- parimal space

NASA's probe has a total of three onboard computers. The first is FDS (Flight Data System.), which collects and stores data from all the science instruments installed in the Voyager; the second is AACS (Attitude and Articulation Control System), which controls the alignment and position of the Voyager; and the third is its main system, CCS (Computer Command System), which controls the above two systems as well as the voyager’s whole system.
So when Voyager travels in space, these trios (individually) collect information and then convert it into binary codes, e.g., 010101010, etc., and when this data is completely collected, it is sent through a data transmission device called the TMU (Telemetry Modulation Unit), through which it is sent to Earth. After which, the old scientists of the Voyager project sitting on Earth together decoded it. But recently, the three systems of Voyager have had two major problems. The AACS (Attitude and Articulation Control System), which controls the alignment and position of Voyager, got damaged. As a result, it was not able to communicate properly with the TMU (Telemetry Modulation Unit). Because of this incorrect communication, NASA’s system continuously started getting random signals of zeros and ones. And the second problem was that Voyager’s communications antennas were slowly getting thrusters that pointed towards the Earth, which was slowly damaging. Actually, in Voyager, fuel is ignited from pipes and goes to thrusters. But the problem is that after every firing of thrusters, the fuel that doesn’t burn starts to accumulate in those pipes. And now, as we all know, it launched in 1977; since then, almost 40 years, the thrusters have been continuously firing, so from that point on, they were almost at a point of failure. And if these thrusters were stopped, NASA wouldn't be able to point the Voyager’s antennas towards Earth.

source- parimal space

How NASA deals with this big problem.

DEEP SPACE NETWORK In this network, there were three 70-meter-long antennas located in the United States, Spain, and Australia. And if you place trace three in the center of the earth, you will see the location of these trios at a 120-degree angle from each other. Through this, NASA can communicate with its spacecraft every second despite the rotation of Earth, and that’s why the Deep Space Network was NASA’s ideal choice to send Voyager software updates while sitting on Earth.
Now the next question is how we install this update in such small storage because, as I explained earlier, this spacecraft has such a small capacity that we can’t even upload high-quality images to it. So after thinking about it, NASA came up with a solution that was as simple as it was difficult to listen to. They had to write a code that would solve the problems of both computers and thrusters in a small space. And surprisingly, such a code was written, and the idea of making such a code came from seeing a computer’s keyboard. Actually, just like repeated tasks on the PC,like shortcut keys for cut and paste, they also wrote repeated tasks of voyagers in their code, such as thrusters firing, taking pictures, sending back data, and pointing position towards Earth. They wrote shortcuts for these. And then, these shortcuts were written in the language of the systems on Voyager1, which is designed to understand, that is, in the assembly language. They made the small code. Basically, the assembly language is a hardware-type-based language that directly controls the hardware on Voyager 1, whereas all the languages today are software-based languages. And this is the reason why NASA still wants to keep its employees under control: if they hire other researchers instead of them, then the new researchers will know about the software language, not the hardware, so they have to start from zero. Before writing the code, they will also have to understand which Voyager hardware is in that Voyager, how many components are there on it, and how it is connected to whom, and that’s why NASA made the code from its old researchers.

Now, when the code was ready, it was time to send it on Voyager 1, but before this, they had one final question in front of them, which was whether the short code they wrote was actually working or not. Well, to verify this, NASA came up with an idea that would kill two birds with one stone. Before sending the software update in Voyager 1, they send this software update in Voyager 2.

The Voyager 2 had two advantages.

1. Voyager 2 is able to communicate properly with NASA, and it is closer to us than Voyager 1. And so if we had updated it before, we would have gotten the results comparatively faster.

2. If the update was done correctly, then Voyager 2 would have been able to avoid the problems that happened to Voyager 1 in the future.

Keeping this in mind, on October 28, 2023, NASA sent a message to Voyager 1 that they had successfully installed the update on Voyager 2 through the Deep Space Network, and after it had been successfully installed and run, NASA sent the same update signal to Voyager 1 from the same deep space network, and finally, after a journey of about 22 hours, that update signal reached Voyager 1.

source- parimal space

AACS (Attitude and Articulation Control System) is stored in its plated wire memory. Basically, what happens is that the wires and metal plates align with each other in such a way that at the point where these plates and wires intersect, a bit, e.g., 0 or 1, is stored at that point. Now, as the current passes through these wires, a magnetic field is generated there. If the current goes from right to left in the plate, then the magnetic field rotates clockwise and 0 is stored there, and if the direction of the current is opposite, then 1 will be stored through this. As a result, the direction of the magnetic field was also changed, the bit was flipped, and a new update was installed in it. As soon as it was installed, the shortcut keys written in it put the tasks of thrusters firing, taking pictures, and sending back data into automation, and thrusters started firing in the same direction. This is how we installed a big update on Voyager 1 while sitting on Earth.

source- parimal space

— Team Yuva Aaveg

(Mayank)

To keep yourself updated!!

Join our channels

Telegram    Whats App