Next hardware reset and automatic reorientation for Voyager 2 is October 15th. Yes the device automatically resets itself about four to five times a year. Communications are expected to be reestablished then.
Wikipedia states: “In July 2023, communication with Voyager 2 was lost when flight control pointed its antenna away from Earth, moving it by 2 degrees away from Earth. The NASA dish antenna in Canberra is being used to search for the space probe and will be used to saturate its location with commands to re-align the probe’s antenna in an attempt to re-establish the radio link. If NASA fails to contact the probe, it is expected that an automatic system on Voyager 2 will direct its dish toward Earth in October 2023.”
So essentially someone probably wanted to move it one way and it moved the other. It should automatically reposition itself in contact with NASA in 2 months. It’s amazing the foresight we had in 1977 to write in all sorts of catch-alls… In 2 months we’ll get back in contact with the probe and it will have its own place, hanging out with aliens.
Sounds like it’s a recoverable error (if the scientists can’t do it the spacecraft has an automated process that’ll kick in in October.) Still, I can’t imagine what that must feel like.
Wow! Wondering how the guy is being treated who sent the wrong command. I did it once at my work and people were acting really Weird. In my defense, I never really liked the job.
This. And even then there should be procedures in place to essentially make it impossible to send the wrong inputs.
It’s like when an intern accidentally drops the production database. It’s not the interns fault for sending the wrong command. It’s the managements fault for not restricting access in the first place.
This. This. I used to work on safety control systems for heavy industrial applications and it’s this. Once the system is running any changes at all went through a whole chain of people. When the change was being implemented I had my supervisor and their manager checking every line over my shoulder before we wrote it. Then test. Then lock it down with a digital signature.
It’s not at all like in college/university where you’re making changes to your code over and over. Well it is in simulations but that’s long before you deploy it. By the end everyone involved should be able to say exactly what every line of code is going to do. This isn’t an intern fucking up, the whole team did, and whomever the buck stops with at the top is responsible.
If you’re talking about Voyager, I’d assume so, but I don’t have any source to back that up. If you’re talking about my previous work, the test environment was exact enough… Cough not-even-close cough.
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