Although it’s been quite some time since I’ve written about Voyager, our two interstellar craft (and this is indeed what they are at present, the first to return data from beyond the heliosphere) are never far from my mind. That has been the case since 1989, when I stayed up all night for the Neptune encounter and was haunted by the idea that we were saying goodbye to these doughty travelers. Talk about naivete! Now that I know as many people in this business as I do, I should have realized just how resilient they were, and how focused on keeping good science going from deep space.
Not to mention how resilient and well-built the craft they control are. Thirty five years have passed since the night of that encounter (I still have VCR tape from it on my shelf), and the Voyagers are still ticking. This despite the recent issues with data return from Voyager 1 that for a time seemed to threaten an earlier than expected end to the mission. We all know that it won’t be all that long before both craft succumb to power loss anyway. Decay of the onboard plutonium-238 enabling their radioisotope thermal generators (RTGs) means they will be unable to summon up the needed heat to allow continued operation. We may see this regrettable point reached as soon as next year.
But it’s been fascinating to watch over the years how the Voyager interstellar team manages the issue, shutting down specific instruments to conserve power. The glitch that recently occurred got everyone’s attention in November of 2023, when Voyager 1 stopped sending its normal science and engineering back to Earth. Both craft were still receiving commands, but it took considerable investigation to figure out that the flight data subsystem (FDS) aboard Voyager 1, which packages and relays scientific and engineering data from the craft for transmission, was causing the problem.
What a complex and fascinating realm long-distance repair is. I naturally think back to Galileo, the Jupiter-bound mission whose high-gain antenna could not be properly deployed, and whose data return was saved by the canny use of the low-gain antenna and a revised set of parameters for sending and acquiring the information. Thus we got the Europa imagery, among much else, that is still current, and will be complemented by Europa Clipper by the start of the next decade. The farther into space we go, the more complicated repair becomes, an issue that will force a high level of autonomy on our probes as we push well past the Kuiper Belt and one day to the Oort Cloud.
Image: I suppose we all have heroes, and these are some of mine. After receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in five months, members of the Voyager flight team celebrate in a conference room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on April 20. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
In the case of Voyager 1, the problem was traced to the aforesaid flight data subsystem, which essentially hands the data off to the telemetry modulation unit (TMU) and radio transmitter. Bear in mind that all of this is 1970s era technology still operational and fixable, which not only reminds us of the quality of the original workmanship, but also the capability we are developing to ensure missions lasting decades or even centuries can continue to operate. The Voyager engineers gave a command to prompt Voyager 1 to return a readout of FDS memory, and that allowed them to confirm that about 3 percent of that memory had been corrupted.
Culprit found. There may be an errant chip involved in the storage of memory within Voyager 1’s FDS, possibly a result of an energetic particle hit, or more likely, simple attrition after the whopping 46 years of Voyager operation. All this was figured out in March, and the fix was determined to be avoiding the now defunct memory segment by storing different portions of the needed code in different addresses in the FDS, adjusting them so that they still functioned, and updating the rest of the system’s memory to reflect the changes. This with radio travel times of 22 ½ hours one way.
The changes were implemented on April 18, ending the five month hiatus in normal communications. I hadn’t written about any of the Voyager 1 travails, more or less holding my breath in hopes that the problem would somehow be resolved. Because the day the Voyagers go silent is something I don’t want to see. Hence my obsession with the remaining possibilities for the craft, laid out in Voyager to a Star.
Engineering data is now being returned in usable form, with the next target, apparently achievable, being the return of science data. So a fix to a flight computer some 163 AU from the Sun has us back in the interstellar business. The incident casts credit on everyone involved, but also forces the question of how far human intervention will be capable of dealing with problems as the distance from home steadily increases. JHU/APL’s Interstellar Probe, for example, has a ‘blue sky’ target of 1000 AU. Are we still functional with one-way travel times of almost six days? Where do we reach the point where onboard autonomy completely supersedes any human intervention?
An excerpt from my memoirs, written decades ago…
“NASA has launched many spacecraft to explore distant points in the solar system, and software plays a key role in how these robot spaceships work. But it takes years to get a space probe operational, political and funding delays as well as long development times usually mean that by the time the spacecraft is launched the computers aboard are obsolete. Add to this the length of the voyage itself, which may take years, and by the time the craft gets to where it’s going the software systems on board are positively archaic. In spite of this, the operators of these spacecraft have proven themselves to be extremely clever at squeezing totally unexpected performance from these systems, working around catastrophic malfunctions, often remotely under very difficult conditions. This has been possible because mission staffs are devoted to the mission, not the technology, they have risked their careers by learning everything there is to know about a now-obsolete system. And they have had the time to learn to get good at it. This is not the mind set encouraged by the working environment of most technologists, where experts on old systems are considered fossils or Luddites.
In an environment were “keeping up with the latest technology” is highly prized, deep experience and mastery are often sacrificed. The result is that for the most part, programmers and system engineers do not know what they are doing, everyone is working in the dark, by intuition. We use only a tiny portion of the capability of our equipment, and we cover up our failure to utilize it fully by constantly demanding even more capability. The situation is not quite as bad in hardware, where it takes time and effort to move a concept from the engineer’s mind to the marketplace, after all, there are all those factories and machine tools which have to be mobilized. But in software a fundamental change can be typed into a keyboard in the morning and out to the users in an afternoon email. This is why computer hardware is so reliable and computer software is so prone to failure. Putting it another way, we couldn’t afford to build the Panama Canal today, the software costs would be too high.”
I used to be a Silicon Valley scientific/engineering programmer, working on image processing applications in FORTRAN. Now, I need to consult with my wife to learn how to use my home computer.
Henry, I believe your memoirs will be worth reading! Good stuff.
Thank you Henry! We were talking about car engines this afternoon: they have a very “fine” electronic management but a complexity that we can no longer master: we can not change an electric board of the engine while 40 years ago we could adjust even its carburetor. The more refined the technology, the less we master it except a handful of high-level specialists. Transposed to the space domain it would mean that if the guys from NASA (or SETI etc) suddenly disappeared while an E.T message arrived, we would probably be unable to take back in hand this technology to answer! This raises the question of the democratization of knowledge. The problem of the obsolescence of techniques over long periods has already been discussed with both computer programs and their media (cd-rom) I think we must think to leave our descandants, a technology sufficiently “rustic” but at the same time efficient, so that they can apprehend it. The stones of Cheops have crossed the millennia;)
Don’t get me started! Not only can I program in FORTRAN, I still drive a stick shift, operate a slide rule and can navigate with a sextant; yet I don’t own a smart phone. The complexity of modern software has just the opposite effect it was intended to have: it makes it harder to learn to improvise! All our knowledge is in easily reproducible digital form, but the storage media change so frequently no one bothers making copies. Do you still keep your punch cards and floppy disks?
And there is a long term effect to this complexity and specialization many have failed to consider. In the event of a world-wide catastrophe, natural or man-made, can civilization ever recover?
When the Roman Empire collapsed, the government, the roads, the civil administration, military defense and public utilities went with it, but every village in Europe had a well, still was able to grow food, mill grain, weave cloth, breed livestock, work metals, build houses and boats and so on. Every house could bake bread. The seeds were there to rebuild society. And every dwelling was within walking distance of a church where men kept and read books.
Today, the average person doesn’t even know how to start a fire, much less do slash and burn agriculture. And farmers cannot produce without powered irrigation, farm machinery, and chemical fertilizers and pesticides. I fear in the event of a technological cascade meltdown (like having a solar flare knock out all the satellites and power grids) we would quickly slide back into barbarism.
I remember once discussing this same topic with some of my colleagues at work. I asked them (all young, well-educated programmers, engineers and scientists) if they had a “19th century skill”. I was a sailor, one replied he kept horses, another was a black powder muzzle-loader shooting enthusiast who cast his own bullets. When I asked Jan, my office partner, what her 19th century skill was, she replied; “Golf”.
Contrary to the optimistic claims of its boosters, technology does NOT make us secure from unexpected change, it leaves us all the more vulnerable to it. That last term in the Drake Equation, the average lifetime of a civilization, needs to be drastically revised downward. When the apocalypse comes, it will not mean a slow evolution from a feudal medievalism followed by an inevitable Renaissance, it will be an immediate collapse to the cannibal time.
@Henry – 19th Century Technology
If we face a severe technological meltdown that takes at least a year or 2 to recover from, the first thing to realize is that the rich northern nations will literally starve, reducing the population drastically. If it continues, the population will fall towards 19th-century levels in the north with the exception of the N. America can sustain a higher immigrant population than it had at the time. England’s population would probably fall to 1/3rd of today’s numbers due to lack of food.
Those nations will become dystopias that sort of peter out when the bullets run out.
However, the skills to maintain some basic level of technology, perhaps associated with those Hollywood Westerns, will still exist. There are many people who maintain them. Even crafting pistols and rifles/muskets will exist. There are any number of SciFi stories set in different places that might be useful templates.
Some years ago, on his blog, sci-fi writer Charlie Stross questioned how far back could we repair technology given a loss. The 1950s was a best guess. Not so bad, perhaps, but not good.
An existential threat that really beats us down will just leave the world to those who never really used any sort of modern technology. Subsistence farmers using local materials and draft animals will continue assuming they don’t all fall prey to “acute lead poisoning”.
The tv series remake, Shogun, ended with Blackthorne hoping to rebuild his oceangoing ship. No doubt the Japanese could do that with the wreck that existed, but could they build one from scratch? Unlikely.
Setbacks from civilizational collapses can take centuries. I am all for not losing the knowledge to rebuild as quickly as possible. There were a number of posts some years ago on this site by Heath Rezabek about how to preserve knowledge, which might bear reading to understand how to overcome losses, e.g. Of an Archive on the Moon. Remember, even paper is vulnerable to fire, so creating as many copies of knowledge as possible is important, as is storing them to prevent them from rotting with time. [Should we go back to vellum?]
If civilization falls back too far, knowing how to use a sextant could have you killed as a witch, depending on how religious/superstitious the culture is. Sextants alone are not effective without other supporting technologies, magnetic compasses, maps, seaworthy ships, and the technologies needed to construct them (could you construct a sextant from scratch?). :-(
You’re right about sextants. Without the Nautical Almanac (published yearly with computers by astronomers working for a government bureaucracy) and accurate timepieces (resettable by short wave radio) they are useless. OTOH, I DO know how to construct a sextant from scratch (but only a very crude affair that could only give me an approximate latitude).
Sure, there may be people out there who know how to make soap, shoe a horse or tan leather, but my point is that in the past there used to be a great number of people out there with those skills. A slide rule and expertise with FORTRAN will not get me through the apocalypse.
Today, the average person can’t even start a fire without matches.
I doubt I could. And I’ve only met one human being in my entire life who could chip a projectile point from a piece of flint.
@Henry
I was trained to use a sextant for shore navigation. Basically triangulation.
Crude versions could work well enough but it still needs a decent map.
As James Burke noted, everything is connected, and economist Brian Arthur explained that technologies build on previous ones with exponential growth. [Look at the explosion in computer hardware and software in the last few decades and what they have enabled.]
Skills transfer could happen fast enough with apprentices to pass skills and expand the base of the trained. Vastly slower than using online systems. But some skills would be lost, just as we lost the Roman’s skill to make concrete, and some fabric creation techniques.
At the risk of straying a bit off-topic, you don’t need a chart OR a compass to navigate with the sextant. A Universal Plotting Sheet
can be used to construct a small Mercator map of the area adjacent to your ship. These sheets can bought from a marine dealer, or constructed with a simple protractor on a sheet of blank paper.
The plotting sheet can then give you a lat/long of your fix.
But you still need an current almanac, an accurate timepiece correctable to GMT, and sight reduction tables. The latter may survive the End Times, but the former will not.
Too true.
IIRC, the shuttle astronauts brought laptops with them because the redundant computers on the shuttle were so obsolete. It is ever thus with rapid technology change. Technology change is accelerating, while deep space missions will get even longer. Will there come a point when there will no longer be humans around to be able to understand the systems? Will all this have to be handled by smart computer systems?
But most of today’s software is built under business conditions, where time to market is paramount. We have seen what happens under these conditions with Silicon Valley’s “move fast and break things”, as well as launching beta software and letting the users test it (et tu, Tesla?). We saw the Y2K problem of finding retired Cobol programmers to fix the date systems, even though is almost trivial by comparison.
Just as digital libraries with efficient electronic search solved the problem of manual library stack searches for prior work reducing science productivity, we may be on the cusp of being saved from the difficulty of managing complex hardware and software design problems. Just as software largely solved the difficulty of chip design, I suspect AI will prove to be the “magic pixie dust” to solve the complexities and potential failures of such systems, allowing ever larger, more complex systems to be built.
As for people interested in “ancient” computing, there are a number of Facebook groups that cater to such interests. Hobbyists build simple computers with old chip technology, repair and restore old computers, and run them. These folks are keeping the knowledge alive like artisans maintaining the knowledge to keep old methods of making alive.
Starship is large enough to where you could put vacuum tubes, mechanical computers—pack it with the oldest tech there is :)
Definite shades of “Space Cowboys” with a team fixing “ancient” systems, but from Earth.
The computing technology of the Voyagers while hugely advanced from the Apollo era, predates all but the earliest home computers, using old TTL and some CMOS chips. All 3 computer systems had a 2nd system as a backup. Programming was originally in Fortran.
Voyager program
The Brains of the Voyager Spacecraft: Command, Data, and Attitude Control Computers
While the systems are miniscule by today’s standards, in some respects that is an advantage. Their chips used much larger transistors that are less likely to be prone to particle damage, and probably less likely to fail too. Modern computers like smartphones are far more delicate and likely to fail over a long term in space, although this can be mitigated by fault-tolerant systems. [I would be interested in knowing the approaches being used for the proposed ISM missions to ensure their longevity which would need to exceed the Voyagers’ current duration in space.] The small size of the memory space for the programs probably helped track down the point[s] of failure, allowing the fix to be made. Did NASA engineers have a replicate computer on the ground to work on, or perhaps a simulation, to test where the failure was and correct it?
40 hours turnaround time to test a system reminded me of my very early forays into mainframe computing as a student in the early 1970s. Interactive computing that arrived in the early 1970s (in the UK) made all the difference in programming productivity.
I was in the chip making industry (measuring equipment) in silicon valley, and some of the stuff our equipment was used for at wafer level — even in the 80s — was rad hardened for space/milspec use. Not quite off the shelf (same part/pins different material construction.) I still remember what rad hardened memory looked like vs what was in a PC (the silicon itself.) Not the same. You’d have to speak to a chemical engineer of the period for a better idea of how that was accomplished.
Late 1970’s tech is probably a sweet spot for longevity
I just read the article: nice feat! The idea of splitting the code with the instructions begs a question: what if an interstellar message was also divided into pieces and “hidden” in several technologies or medium (radio waves, light etc)? the message could be read by the receiver only when he masters all these technologies. If I say otherwise: maybe a civilization has already sent its hidden message in different things but we cannot perceive it because we are not yet able to decode everything? Pr Michio KAKU had suggested something similar… I like the idea;)
Even when Voyager 1 and 2 can no longer transmit, their mission is far from over:
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2018/10/12/the-farthest-voyager-in-space/
https://www.centauri-dreams.org/2013/01/18/the-last-pictures-contemporary-pessimism-and-hope-for-the-future/
Hi Paul
Yes a very good read, I must have been around 10 in 1989 and following the Voyagers at that age lead me to a lifelong interest in space and astronomy.
Great technical work from the team here on these spacecraft.
Thanks Edwin
Here are some videos of Voyager 2’s encounter with Neptune in 1989:
https://youtu.be/I4io958_BBo?si=QVfctTTUnpq5tLxo
https://youtu.be/Hwb-o5N9LBM?si=i-i6K5UDCQ8oDYT3
https://youtu.be/zlI4H68oZmc?si=v2p6MLPptQiKw-is
Hi Paul
I fear there might be foul-play at work. What if the Great Galactic Ghoul targeted “Voyager 1” to get a fix on Earth via seeing where the instructions come from?
Jokes aside, is there a chance that “Voyager 1” has picked up a hitch-hiker that’s toying with its systems? Has a Benford Lurker parked in the Scattered Disk taken an interest in artefacts leaving the Sun?
Some good SF plots there, Adam. Have at it!
Speaking of speculative stories involving the Voyager probe, I always love this one from the February, 1980 issue of Omni magazine…
https://williamflew.com/omni17a.html
The theme for the opening night concert is “The Eternal Bach,” named after a phonograph record, known as “The Golden Record,” which has been on the NASA spacecraft Voyager 1 since 1977 when it launched and is still in outer space today. Contained on this record are sounds and images from Earth (in the event the spacecraft comes into contact with extraterrestrial beings), including 20 works of music, of which three are by J.S. Bach — each will be performed at the opening of the festivals in New York and Portland (June 19-25).
Full article here:
https://www.westsiderag.com/2024/04/29/world-renowned-bach-virtuosi-festival-comes-to-the-upper-west-side
If the Voyager probes had been built today, would there be any differences (from 2017):
https://www.imeche.org/news/news-article/voyager-40-years-on-would-modern-technology-make-a-difference
To quote:
The craft itself probably wouldn’t change much, says Dodd. The thermal blanket, for instance, which protects all the sensitive electronics inside from radiation, would be very similar – just lighter, perhaps. There would still be the same nuclear power source, because solar power isn’t an option – the craft are too far from the Sun. “In a lot of ways, Voyager has lasted 40 years in part due to some of the simplicity of it and the robustness of the design,” says Dodd.
…
The on-board memory for storing sequence information is very limited – there are only about 1,500 18-bit words available between the two Computer Command Subsystem memories for storing sequence instructions. In total, Voyager has to make do with just 64kb of memory – but in a package that’s about the size of a loaf of bread. Nowadays, your smartphone has 200,000 times more memory, says Dodd – and the chip where it’s stored is about the size of your pinky fingernail.
THE COMPUTERS OF VOYAGER
by: Dan Maloney
May 6, 2024
After more than four decades in space and having traveled a combined 44 billion kilometers, it’s no secret that the Voyager spacecraft are closing in on the end of their extended interstellar mission. Battered and worn, the twin spacecraft are speeding along through the void, far outside the Sun’s influence now, their radioactive fuel decaying, their signals becoming ever fainter as the time needed to cross the chasm of space gets longer by the day.
But still, they soldier on, humanity’s furthest-flung outposts and testaments to the power of good engineering. And no small measure of good luck, too, given the number of nearly mission-ending events which have accumulated in almost half a century of travel. The number of “glitches” and “anomalies” suffered by both Voyagers seems to be on the uptick, too, contributing to the sense that someday, soon perhaps, we’ll hear no more from them.
That day has thankfully not come yet, in no small part due to the computers that the Voyager spacecraft were, in a way, designed around. Voyager was to be a mission unlike any ever undertaken, a Grand Tour of the outer planets that offered a once-in-a-lifetime chance to push science far out into the solar system.
Getting the computers right was absolutely essential to delivering on that promise, a task made all the more challenging by the conditions under which they’d be required to operate, the complexity of the spacecraft they’d be running, and the torrent of data streaming through them. Forty-six years later, it’s safe to say that the designers nailed it, and it’s worth taking a look at how they pulled it off.
Full article here:
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/06/the-computers-of-voyager/
To quote:
VOLATILE (INSTITUTIONAL) MEMORY
That turns out that getting to the heart of the Voyager computers, in terms of schematics and other technical documentation, wasn’t that easy. For a project with such an incredible scope and which had an outsized impact on our understanding of the outer planets and our place in the galaxy, the dearth of technical information about Voyager is hard to get your head around. Most of the easily accessible information is pretty high-level stuff; the juicy technical details are much harder to come by. This is doubly so for the computers running Voyager, many of the details of which seem to be getting lost in the sands of time.
As a case in point, I’ll offer an anecdote. As I was doing research for this story, I was looking for anything that would describe the architecture of the Flight Data System, one of the three computers aboard each spacecraft and the machine that has been the focus of the recent glitch and recovery effort aboard Voyager 1.
I kept coming across a reference to a paper with a most promising title: “Design of a CMOS Processor for use in the Flight Data Subsystem of a Deep Space Probe.”
I searched high and low for this paper online, but it appears not to be available anywhere but in a special collection in the library of Witchita State University, where it’s in the personal papers of a former professor who did some work for NASA.
Unfortunately, thanks to ongoing construction, the library has no access to the document right now. The difficulty I had in rounding up this potentially critical document seems to indicate a loss of institutional knowledge of the Voyager program’s history and its technical origins. That became apparent when I reached out to public affairs at Jet Propulsion Lab, where the Voyagers were built, in the hope that they might have a copy of that paper in their archives. Sadly, they don’t, and engineers on the Voyager team haven’t even heard of the paper. In fact, they’re very keen to see a copy if I ever get a hold of it, presumably to aid their job of keeping the spacecraft going.
In the absence of detailed technical documents, the original question remains: How do the computers of Voyager work? I’ll do the best I can to answer that from the existing documentation, and hopefully fill in the blanks later with any other documents I can scrape up.
RTFM and STFM, folks!
I found the name and location where the document mentioned in the above piece is:
https://specialcollections.wichita.edu/collections/ms/87-08/87-8-A.HTML
Judging by the huge list of items Dr. James E. Tomayko donated to Wichita State University, NASA should definitely consider having their own copies as well for both them and us. In this day and age, that should not be the physical storage problem it once may have been.
Now would someone please go and get “Design of a CMOS Processor for use in the Flight Data Subsystem of a Deep Space Probe” and give it to the Voyager team at JPL!
Storms, frogs and a kiss: how a group of scientists designed a message from humanity to aliens
Ceridwen Dovey
Mon 6 May 2024 11.00 EDT
When researching space objects and a far-flung message made for aliens, I was drawn to the question: what do we choose to memorialise – or forget?
https://www.theguardian.com/books/article/2024/may/07/storms-frogs-and-a-kiss-how-a-group-of-scientists-designed-a-message-from-humanity-to-aliens
Apparently, the USA and China are both working on next generation Voyager probes…
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/china-and-nasa-are-developing-next-gen-voyager-like-spacecraft-which-one-is-better/vi-BB1iNsGo?ocid=entnewsntp&pc=U531&cvid=3bf727115bc14b9e83f4fc98155df9ed&ei=16#details
This Week In Space podcast: Episode 110 — Voyager 1’s Brush with Silence
By Space.com Staff published 2 days ago
Saving an Icon With Project Scientist Dr. Linda Spilker
https://www.space.com/entertainment/space-movies-shows/this-week-in-space-podcast-episode-110-voyager-1-brush-science
On Episode 110 of This Week In Space, Rod and Tariq talk with Linda Spilker, Voyager project scientist, about the recent rescue of Voyager 1 from beyond the solar system.
The Voyager probes have been transiting space since 1977, and they’re still at it 46 years later. But late in 2023, Voyager 1, now 15 billion miles distant, started sending what the flight controllers called “gibberish” back to Earth — uncoordinated ones and zeros and a heartbeat tone. They knew it was still alive, but something had gone wrong.
The small team of software wizards at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory got to work and came up with a workaround… but due to the age of the program, did not have an old enough computer on the ground to test it! They’d have to eyeball the sequence and send it to overwrite existing programming on the spacecraft.
https://twit.tv/shows/this-week-in-space/episodes/110
Here’s how Carl Sagan ensured that legend Chuck Berry’s music would exist for billions of years to come
Chuck Berry received a letter from Carl Sagan on his 60th birthday and it addresses how his hit track ‘Johnny B. Goode’ will last billions of years and more.
By Rima Biswas
January 19, 2024
https://scoop.upworthy.com/carl-sagan-ensured-that-legend-chuck-berrys-music-will-exist-for-billions-of-years-to-come
Voyager 1’s stunning pic of Earth that prompted Carl Sagan to make an appeal for global conservation
Story by Abhiram Sajai • 7mo •
Going through our everyday routines, it can become challenging to comprehend things on a bigger scale. While it is important to be occupied, it is also beneficial to take a moment and step back to reflect on our place in the cosmos.
For Carl Sagan, a renowned astronomer, that is exactly what happened as he looked at a photograph of Earth, aptly named “Pale Blue Dot,” taken from deep space by the Voyager 1 space probe. According to NASA, the photograph was taken when the probe was at a distance of 3.7 billion miles from the Sun on February 13, 1990.
https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/voyager-1-s-stunning-pic-of-earth-that-prompted-carl-sagan-to-make-an-appeal-for-global-conservation/ar-AA1i8t5k
The Eternal Bach: Celebrating Bach and beyond at New York’s Bach Virtuosi Festival
21 MAY 2024
Ben Pyne reports back from the opening concert of Lewis Kaplan’s Bach Virtuosi Festival, which took inspiration from NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft:
https://www.thestrad.com/playing-hub/the-eternal-bach-celebrating-bach-and-beyond-at-new-yorks-bach-virtuosi-festival/18056.article
To quote:
The Bach Virtuosi Festival, founded and directed by violinist, conductor, and pedagogue Lewis Kaplan, launched its New York concert series on 14 May 2024. Bringing this festival, which began in Portland, Maine in 2016, to New York has been Kaplan’s desire for several years. The Portland festival will continue with its ninth season from 19-25 June.
The opening night concert for BVF NY, entitled ’The Eternal Bach,’ presented three Bach pieces, Prelude and Fugue in C Major from The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book II; Gavotte from the E Major Partita for solo violin; and Brandenburg Concerto no. 2, that are preserved on the Golden Record on NASA’s Voyager 1.
Christoph Wolff, the renowned Bach historian and scholar, opened the festival on 13 May with an introductory lecture where he expounded that these works of Bach were likely chosen for NASA because they each represent major cyclical instrumental compositions, namely The Well-Tempered Clavier, the six solo works for violin, and the six Brandenburg Concerti.
These works at the opening concert bookended a programme, which also included the Motet, ’Jesu Meine Freude’ BWV 227, three vocal arias, Flute Sonata in B minor BWV 1030 and Organ Sonata BWV 528 arranged for Trio Sonata. What at first glance might seem like an eclectic combination was drawn together beautifully by the clever dramaturgy and the exquisite performances.
Harpsichordist Arthur Haas began the musical journey (of both the festival and Voyager 1) with an exciting rendition of the C Major Prelude and Fugue, and violinist Ariadne Daskalakis joined him onstage for a seamless and graceful transition to the E Major Gavotte, exploring all the different characters of each episode and the depths of this playful work. Flutist Emi Ferguson and cellist Nathan Whittaker joined them for the Trio Sonata, in which the ensemble’s expert chamber music-making gave the piece not only rhythmic excitement but also a nuanced transparency and beauty.
Following, ’Jesu meine Freude’ was sung exquisitely by vocalists Sherezade Panthaki, Helen Karloski, Jay Carter, Jacob Perry, and Paul Max Tipton. The voices, each special in their own right, were beautifully matched; they breathed and sang as one. The performance was in turn lyrical, expressive, and dramatic, and in itself an argument that this piece would also have been an excellent choice for the Voyager’s Golden Record.
There are three pieces of music from Bach on the Golden Record:
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/golden-record/whats-on-the-record/music/
They are…
Bach, Brandenburg Concerto No. 2 in F. First Movement, Munich Bach Orchestra, Karl Richter, conductor. 4:40 (the first piece of music on the Record)
Bach, “Gavotte en rondeaux” from the Partita No. 3 in E major for Violin, performed by Arthur Grumiaux. 2:55
Bach, The Well-Tempered Clavier, Book 2, Prelude and Fugue in C, No.1. Glenn Gould, piano. 4:48
So, who is with me in beaming out all of Bach 24/7 into the Milky Way galaxy!
We Are Singing Stardust: Carl Sagan on the Story of Humanity’s Greatest Message and How the Golden Record Was Born
BY MARIA POPOVA
In 1939, just before his fifth birthday, Carl Sagan visited the New York World’s Fair, where he marveled at the Time Capsule evincing the fair’s confidence in the future — a hermetically sealed chamber, filled with newspapers, books and artifacts from that year, buried in Flushing Meadows to be revisited in some far-off future era by a future culture very different from and curious about the present.
“There was something graceful and very human in the gesture, hands across the centuries, an embrace of our descendants and our posterity,” Sagan writes in Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record (public library) — the fascinating chronicle of how, in the early fall of 1977, he and a team of collaborators imbued a similar time capsule with even greater hopefulness of cosmic proportions and sent it into space aboard the Voyager spacecraft as humanity’s symbolic embrace of other civilizations.
On it, they set out to explain our planet and our civilization to another in 117 pictures, greetings in 54 different languages and one from humpback whales, and a representative selection of “the sounds of Earth,” ranging from an avalanche to an elephant’s trumpet to a kiss, as well as nearly 90 minutes of some of the world’s greatest music.
Sagan, in his characteristic eloquence, writes of the motivation, offering a poetic, humbling, and timelier than ever reminder of just how misplaced our existential arrogance is:
The coming of the space age has brought with it an interest in communication over time intervals far longer than any [of our predecessors] could have imagined, as well as the means to send messages to the distant future. We have gradually realized that we humans are only a few million years old on a planet a thousand times older. Our modern technical civilization is one ten-thousandth as old as mankind. What we know well has lasted no longer than the blink of an eyelash in the enterprise of cosmic time. Our epoch is not the first or the best. Events are occurring at a breathless pace and no one knows what tomorrow will bring — whether our present civilization will survive the perils that face us and be transformed, or whether in the next century or two we will destroy our technological society. But in either case it will not be the end of the human species.
Full article here:
https://www.themarginalian.org/2014/02/10/murmurs-of-earth-sagan-golden-record/
To quote:
There will be other people and other civilizations, and they will be different from us. Our civilization is the product of a particular path our ancestors have followed among the vagaries of historical alternatives. Had events of the distant past taken a slightly different turn, our surroundings and thought processes, what we find natural and hold dear, might be very different. Despite our every sense that things should of course be the way that they are, the details of our particular civilization are extraordinarily unlikely, and it is easy to imagine a set of historical events which would have led to a rather different civilization… This lack of historical determinism in the details of a civilization means that those details are of extraordinary value, not just to professional historians but to all who wish to understand the nature of culture. I think it is this respect for the integuments of a civilization that, above all other reasons, make us sympathetic to the enterprise of time capsuling.
…
Since they were including the Secretary General’s message, Sagan thought it appropriate to at least give the President of the United States the opportunity to contribute one as well. To his surprise and delight, President Jimmy Carter eagerly complied, electing to have his message — one of breathtaking optimism — as text rather than audio:
This is a present from a small distant world, a token of our sounds, our science, our images, our music, our thoughts and our feelings. We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours. We hope someday, having solved the problems we face, to join a community of galactic civilizations. This record represents our hope and our determination, and our good will in a vast and awesome universe.
But the most eloquent and moving encapsulation of the spirit of the Golden Record comes from Sagan himself, who extracts from the adventure in musicology a beautiful metaphor for the essence of the project in reflecting on a “charming and powerful tradition” in Javanese gamelan music, which they serendipitously discovered over the course of the research:
There is, it is said, a kind of spirit music in the world, continuously but silently playing. When a gamelan orchestra performs, it is merely making audible the present movement of the music of eternity. Perhaps all of the Voyager record can be viewed similarly — as a local and momentary expression of cosmic discourse, and exchange of greetings and music and information among diverse galactic species that has been in progress for billions of years.
Billions of years from now our sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder. But the Voyager record will still be largely intact, in some other remote region of the Milky Way galaxy, preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished — perhaps before moving on to greater deeds and other worlds — on the distant planet Earth.
In the epilogue to Murmurs of Earth, which is an absolutely wonderful and priceless piece of cultural heritage, Sagan reflects on the legacy of the Golden Record:
One thing would be clear about us: no one sends such a message on such a journey, to other worlds and beings, without a positive passion for the future. For all the possible vagaries of the message, they could be sure that we were a species endowed with hope and perseverance, at least a little intelligence, substantial generosity and a palpable zest to make contact with the cosmos.
Timothy Ferris talks about the Golden Record:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bgFWKSOw5GM
https://www.space.com/voyager-1-mission-glitch-engineers-weighing-in-lucky-peanuts
I was once sitting with my father while Googling how far away various things in the solar system are from Earth. He was looking for exact numbers, and very obviously grew more invested with each new figure I shouted out. I was thrilled. The moon? On average, 238,855 miles (384,400 kilometers) away. The James Webb Space Telescope? Bump that up to about a million miles (1,609,344 km) away. The sun? 93 million miles (149,668,992 km) away. Neptune? 2.8 billion miles (4.5 billion km) away. “Well, wait until you hear about Voyager 1,” I eventually said, assuming he was aware of what was coming. He was not.
“NASA’s Voyager 1 interstellar spacecraft actually isn’t even in the solar system anymore,” I announced. “Nope, it’s more than 15 billion miles (24 billion km) away from us — and it’s getting even farther as we speak.” I can’t quite remember his response, but I do indeed recall an expression of sheer disbelief. There were immediate inquiries about how that’s even physically possible. There were bewildered laughs, different ways of saying “wow,” and mostly, there was a contagious sense of awe. And just like that, a new Voyager 1 fan was born.
05-25-2024
Voyager spacecraft are fighting to survive constant cosmic hostility
By Eric Ralls
Earth.com staff writer
In the vast, uncharted expanse of interstellar space, two intrepid spacecraft, Voyager 1 and 2, are pushing the boundaries of human exploration.
Launched nearly half a century ago, these robotic pioneers have ventured beyond the protective bubble of our sun, the heliosphere, into a realm where no human-made machine has gone before. But this daring journey comes with a price.
Cosmic “bullets” pummeling Voyager spacecraft
Out in interstellar space, Voyager 1 and 2 face a relentless barrage of high-speed particles known as galactic cosmic rays. These tiny, charged particles, accelerated to near light-speed by exploding stars, pose a constant threat to the spacecraft’s aging electronics.
“We are dodging bullets out there,” says Alan Cummings, a cosmic-ray physicist at Caltech who has been involved with the Voyager mission since its inception.
These “bullets” are not to be taken lightly. In 2010, a cosmic ray likely tripped part of Voyager 2‘s memory, causing it to send back gibberish to Earth.
More recently, Voyager 1 went silent for five months, a worrisome incident that may also have been triggered by a cosmic ray damaging a computer chip.
“We don’t know everything,” Cummings admits, referring to the difficulty of diagnosing problems on spacecraft billions of miles away. “But I do think galactic cosmic rays are the guilty party here for most of these problems.”
Full article here:
https://www.earth.com/news/voyager-spacecraft-fighting-survival-cosmic-threats-outside-our-solar-system/
To quote:
Merciless nature of cosmic rays
Galactic cosmic rays are particularly menacing because of their size and speed. They are incredibly tiny, often just the bare nuclei of atoms, and they travel at incredible velocities. The heavier ones, like iron nuclei, can inflict more damage than the lighter ones.
Imagine getting hit by a golf ball at 50 mph versus a bowling ball at the same speed. That’s the difference in destructive power between light and heavy cosmic rays.
These high-energy particles can zip through computer chips, altering their code or even becoming lodged within, causing permanent damage.
Shielding Voyager spacecraft against the invisible
NASA engineers anticipated the harsh environment of space and equipped the Voyager spacecraft with radiation-resistant components and shielding. However, no shield is perfect.
“You can protect yourself to some extent, but a high-enough-energy particle will get through your defenses,” Cummings explains.
The Voyagers faced intense radiation near Jupiter early in their mission, but the particles there were lower in energy. In interstellar space, the risk of encountering high-energy cosmic rays is significantly higher.
Heroes of Voyager spacecraft survival
Back on Earth, a dedicated team of engineers works tirelessly to keep the Voyager spacecraft operational.
These spacecraft have been exploring the far reaches of our solar system for over four decades, providing invaluable data about the outer planets and interstellar space.
Communicating with these distant explorers is no easy feat. The vast distance between Earth and the Voyager spacecraft means that it takes nearly two days for messages to travel back and forth.
This delay presents significant challenges in managing and maintaining the spacecraft’s functionality.
Recently, the engineers faced a significant hurdle when a computer chip on Voyager 1 was permanently damaged.
This damage threatened to halt the spacecraft’s ability to send back crucial health data, which is essential for monitoring its condition and ensuring its continued operation.
However, the team’s ingenuity and expertise shone through as they successfully reprogrammed the spacecraft to work around the damaged chip.
This remarkable feat of engineering allowed Voyager 1 to resume its data transmission, ensuring that the flow of vital information continued uninterrupted.
“You have to praise the engineers,” Cummings emphasizes.
Exploring the unknown
The Voyager spacecraft are running low on power, but if they can withstand the onslaught of cosmic rays, they could continue to send back invaluable data from the uncharted depths of interstellar space for several more years.
Their journey is a testament to human ingenuity and the insatiable desire to explore the unknown.
“Explorers run into problems when they enter into new territory. Lewis and Clark didn’t have an easy time, either,” notes Cummings.
Legacy of Voyager
The Voyager mission has already revolutionized our understanding of the outer solar system and the boundary between our sun’s influence and interstellar space.
As these intrepid spacecraft continue their journey into the unknown, they will undoubtedly uncover even more secrets about the vast and mysterious cosmos that surrounds us.
The future of the Voyager mission remains uncertain. The spacecraft’s power supply is dwindling, and the constant bombardment of cosmic rays poses an ongoing threat.
However, the resilience of these spacecraft and the dedication of the engineers who support them offer hope that they will continue to explore the final frontier for years to come.
Ed Stone, Former Director of JPL and Voyager Project Scientist, Dies
June 11, 2024
https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/ed-stone-former-director-of-jpl-and-voyager-project-scientist-dies
Ed Stone is featured in this wonderful PBS documentary on the Voyager missions:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Tp4t_5v_y_0
https://science.nasa.gov/missions/voyager-program/voyager-1/voyager-1-returning-science-data-from-all-four-instruments/
Voyager 1 Returning Science Data From All Four Instruments
JUN 13, 2024
The spacecraft has resumed gathering information about interstellar space.
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is conducting normal science operations for the first time following a technical issue that arose in November 2023.
The team partially resolved the issue in April when they prompted the spacecraft to begin returning engineering data, which includes information about the health and status of the spacecraft. On May 19, the mission team executed the second step of that repair process and beamed a command to the spacecraft to begin returning science data. Two of the four science instruments returned to their normal operating modes immediately. Two other instruments required some additional work, but now, all four are returning usable science data.
The four instruments study plasma waves, magnetic fields, and particles. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are the only spacecraft to directly sample interstellar space, which is the region outside the heliosphere — the protective bubble of magnetic fields and solar wind created by the Sun.
While Voyager 1 is back to conducting science, additional minor work is needed to clean up the effects of the issue. Among other tasks, engineers will resynchronize timekeeping software in the spacecraft’s three onboard computers so they can execute commands at the right time. The team will also perform maintenance on the digital tape recorder, which records some data for the plasma wave instrument that is sent to Earth twice per year. (Most of the Voyagers’ science data is sent directly to Earth and not recorded.)
Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and Voyager 2 is more than 12 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) from the planet. The probes will mark 47 years of operations later this year. They are NASA’s longest-running and most-distant spacecraft. Both spacecraft flew past Jupiter and Saturn, while Voyager 2 also flew past Uranus and Neptune.
News Media Contact
Calla Cofield
Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.
626-808-2469
calla.e.cofield@jpl.nasa.gov
OBITUARY
10 July 2024
Edward C. Stone obituary: physicist who guided Voyager probes to interstellar space
Space scientist who took humanity on a tour of the Solar System and beyond, in a journey of discovery like no other.
By Alan C. Cummings
https://www.nature.com/articles/d41586-024-02285-w
Edward Stone was a pre-eminent space scientist with an exceptional record of leading space missions and building ground-based astronomical facilities. The public face of NASA’s Voyager missions for the launch of the two probes in 1977, he served as project scientist for 50 years. Stone introduced the world to the wonders of the gas-giant planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune) in multiple press conferences, from Voyager 1’s encounter with Jupiter in 1979 to Voyager 2’s fly-by of Neptune in 1989. He also oversaw the probes entering interstellar space — the first in 2012 and the second in 2018. They continue to transmit data to Earth today.
At the helm of the California Association for Research and Astronomy in the 1990s, Stone was involved in the development of the twin 10-metre Keck telescopes on Maunakea in Hawaii, two of the most productive ground-based astronomical facilities ever built. And as the executive director of the Thirty Meter Telescope, for eight years he oversaw the huge international collaboration that plans to build one of the world’s largest optical–infrared telescopes on the same mountain — land that is sacred to Native Hawaiians, leading to years-long protests and controversy. The telescope aims to capture light from the earliest galaxies in the Universe and search for habitable planets. Stone’s involvement was a service to the astronomy community, because his observational interests were focused on cosmic rays.
Stone was born in Knoxville and grew up in Burlington, both in Iowa. His father was a construction supervisor who communicated his curiosity about how things worked to his son. Stone studied physics at the University of Chicago, Illinois, for a master’s degree and PhD.
Soon after he started studying there, in 1957, the Soviet Union launched Sputnik 1 — the first artificial Earth satellite — starting the space race. Stone took notice, and was at a good place to get involved. His thesis adviser, cosmic-ray-research pioneer John Simpson, was deploying instruments attached to high-altitude balloons as well as using ground-based neutron monitors. Instruments on rockets soon followed. Stone’s thesis experiment was on a now-declassified US spy satellite, Discoverer 31, flown in 1961.
After earning his doctorate in 1964, Stone joined Rochus ‘Robbie’ Vogt, whom he studied alongside at Chicago, at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) in Pasadena, as a research fellow. Together, they formed the Space Radiation Laboratory, where I work. They focused on observations of cosmic rays, with instruments first carried on balloons and later launched into space. Stone moved up the academic ranks at Caltech, becoming a professor of physics in 1976. In 1972, he was appointed project scientist for NASA’s MJS77 mission, later renamed Voyager. Stone was also directly involved in developing an instrument for use aboard the Voyagers — the Cosmic Ray Subsystem — helping to design its cosmic-ray telescopes and draw up the calibration procedures.
The Voyager missions capitalized on a rare alignment of the four gas-giant planets — a once-in-176-years opportunity that allowed a single spacecraft to visit all four. It required a launch between 1976 and 1980 to succeed. For budget reasons, only a two-spacecraft mission to Jupiter and Saturn was initially approved. Voyager 2 was later re-programmed to visit Uranus and Neptune as well.
Eleven experiments were planned. Stone’s role included developing a planetary fly-by programme that would be agreeable to all the participating principal investigators. To accomplish this, he learnt about the science of each experiment — earning the respect of all involved. One of the researchers, Tom Krimigis, recalled: “He was always knowledgeable, insightful and fair in his decisions, with the principal focus on the best science; he never deviated from that.”
The Voyager planetary fly-bys resulted in many discoveries, including moons, rings, a moon with volcanoes, moons with more water than there is on Earth and Triton — a moon of Neptune that is one of the coldest places in the Solar System and yet has geysers. Textbooks on the outer planets of the Solar System were rewritten. But the culmination of Stone’s research career came when Voyager 1 crossed the heliopause — the boundary between interplanetary and interstellar space, at 18.2 billion kilometres from the Sun. The Cosmic Ray Subsystem was at last able to measure something that cannot be quantified inside the heliopause because of the Sun’s outflowing solar wind: the intensity of low-energy cosmic rays in the Milky Way galaxy.
For his work on the Voyagers, Stone was awarded the National Medal of Science by then US president George Bush in 1991, and in 2019 he received the Shaw Prize in astronomy. A prolific administrator and multitasker, Stone chaired the physics, mathematics and astronomy division at Caltech for five years in the 1980s and was the director of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory from 1991 to 2001. During his tenure there, he oversaw the first landing of a robot on another planet — the Mars rover Sojourner. His work ethic was extraordinary. In total, he held a major role on 14 NASA missions and 2 US Department of Defense missions — most of the time while running the Space Radiation Laboratory at Caltech.
In 2022, owing to declining health, Stone retired as Voyager project scientist and became emeritus professor at Caltech. He was always even-tempered in his dealing with colleagues and sought to reach a consensus on whatever debate was going on. He will be greatly missed in both the space-science and astronomical communities.
Nature 631, 501 (2024)
https://doi.org/10.1038/d41586-024-02285-w
https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-07923-8
NASA’s Voyager Missions
Exploring the Outer Solar System and Beyond
2022 – Latest edition
Overview
Authors: Ben Evans
Celebrates the 45th anniversary of the Voyager missions
Explores the achievements of the Voyager probes the context of more recent scientific developments
Traces the evolution of Voyager from its roots in the Mariner project to its financial struggles with the TOPS concept
About this book
2022 marks the 45th anniversary of the Voyager probe launches. Launched into space in 1977, these twin probes explored the farthest reaches of the Solar System before venturing on a one-way journey beyond, all the while testing the bounds of science, robotic exploration and our collective imagination. This heavily revised commemorative book takes a comprehensive look at their incredible achievements, future potential and overall legacy.
Chronicled herein is an epic journey to unveil the mysterious outer reaches of the Solar System for the first time. The book recounts the Voyagers’ travels through the asteroid belt and past the giant gaseous planets Jupiter and Saturn, as well as Voyager 2’s forays near the distant ice giants Uranus and Neptune. Each chapter details in full the game-changing scientific data and glorious imagery they sent back to Earth.
This new edition incorporates all the new data we have learned in the nearly 20 years since its original publication, discussing how the knowledge first gleaned with Voyager has been built upon in subsequent decades by Cassini, Juno and New Horizons.
The Voyager probes captured imaginations around the world; now is an opportune time to reflect on their unparalleled quest across the edges of the Solar System and the enigmatic interstellar medium beyond.