I ran a few research tasks at JPL, small dollar studies.
We'd often recruit part time work from engineers around the lab through informal networks, (instead of the official channels that segment by "specialization").
One year, one of the developers on my task was the apparently last person who could encode the command sequences for Voyager 2 (hoping memory serves me correctly - event though it was only 8 years ago). She would occasionally come late to meetings because they were dealing with some trouble with the old satellite.
Pretty amazing how little is set aside for these projects that most the staff keeping it alive have "day jobs". I hope she's still uploading
To be fair, nearly all of the science payloads on Voyager 1 & 2 have been shut down. The probes are doing very little. The doesn't take away from the very unique science they are doing but its a far cry from what the program offices were doing in 30-40 years ago. I'd expect anyone working on a Voyager probe in 2026 to need something else to do most of the day.
Just the other day I heard about the heroic effort[0] to restore communication with Voyager 2 after they inadvertently changed the antenna to point in the wrong direction by typing in the wrong antenna heading.
Definitely worth a listen if you get the time.
For me personally, I feel this project is the greatest engineering effort in human history bringing together the work of Newton, Kepler, the mathematics of the celestial navigation, gravitational assist techniques[1], etc. necessary to keep a little probe on its route accurately over 50 years in space.
A slight tangent here is a technical deep dive on Voyager 1 fixing a memory corruption error in 2023 by hand 15 billion miles away. Blows my mind of the reverse engineering done to achieve this
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YcUycQoz0zg
Not a very good title, given that the subtitle for the very same article gives the important context that "Voyager 2 would have had to shut down one of its last remaining instruments later this year, until NASA made some power changes."
(as an aside, a celebratory coffee mug for when Voyager 1 finally gets to the 1-light-day-from-earth mark would be very popular, in case anyone from the JPL store is reading this. 'Yesterday's sunrise, today!')
There's not a lot to do. They have enough hydrazine left to keep them pointing back at earth until 2040 or so[1]. So you could perhaps make them point in different directions for a bit, but that is risky as if something goes wrong we might lose contact. And there wouldn't be much point, since there's not enough power to use any of the cameras or other fancy instruments.
...did you seriously just say that? These spacecraft were developed with increidble expertise and intentionality. Give it to a "frontier model" and they'll destroy it faster than you can blink.
One year, one of the developers on my task was the apparently last person who could encode the command sequences for Voyager 2 (hoping memory serves me correctly - event though it was only 8 years ago). She would occasionally come late to meetings because they were dealing with some trouble with the old satellite.
Pretty amazing how little is set aside for these projects that most the staff keeping it alive have "day jobs". I hope she's still uploading
Definitely worth a listen if you get the time.
For me personally, I feel this project is the greatest engineering effort in human history bringing together the work of Newton, Kepler, the mathematics of the celestial navigation, gravitational assist techniques[1], etc. necessary to keep a little probe on its route accurately over 50 years in space.
[0] https://www.npr.org/2023/08/02/1191341035/nasa-voyager-2-spa... [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Minovitch
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
(as an aside, a celebratory coffee mug for when Voyager 1 finally gets to the 1-light-day-from-earth mark would be very popular, in case anyone from the JPL store is reading this. 'Yesterday's sunrise, today!')
[1]: https://space.stackexchange.com/a/36009