Voyager 1’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS) – kit that helps point the probe’s antenna towards Earth -

and do they have a spare ?

No, it's called V'ger.

Beat me to it. Time to find Persis Khambatta and Stephen Collins.

And yet again, the OAP of space keeps going.

I'd like to think of David Attenborough being the human equivalent.. He's over twice the age of the probe, and has probably travelled as much as Voyager-1

If I had one wish that could be granted, it'd be for D.A to be on an alien world doing what he does best.

I wonder what D.A's carbon footprint is!

Indirectly, probably pretty positive for the environment. Someone like him making a point can and does influence billions to be a bit more careful.

I wonder what D.A's carbon footprint is!

Not sure he cares about his carbon footprint

http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/2013/sep/18/david-attenborough-famine-population

If I had one wish that could be granted, it'd be for D.A to be on an alien world doing what he does best.

I agree……

Dear me, and they're thinking of doing a software update with 160b/s of bandwidth ?

Yikes.

Some people are really hardcore.

Well it only has about 70KB of storage anyway.

Mind you, that's still more than twice the uplink speed we used to get with 1200/75 Prestel.

Latency was a tad better though.

"Dear me, and they're thinking of doing a software update with 160b/s of bandwidth ?"

You guys have bandwidth ?

Absolutely Awesome!

A rare use of the word awesome that actually fits.

I'm starting to think NASA's peak wasn't with the moon landings, but was with the Voyager probes. To design something like they did, to operate it like they are, for it to last as long as it has, and for it to still keep going - that can't be bettered I don't think. It really can't..

A pint for the OAP in SPAAAAAAAAAAACE

The unmanned space exploration programme has vastly over delivered. Very impressive!

Knowing what can now be done, one would never send people back to the moon just to do more exploration of it; a rover can almost certainly do just as good a job, for longer and for less money. There has to be another reason to send astronauts somewhere.

Reasons?

Politics

Humans are much more flexible in what they can do, a robot explorer is fixed in function

Downside is that humans are much more delicate, tend to want to be returned back to Earth and need rather more support environment.

Perhaps an acoustic coupler was not the best idea!

Are you suggesting someone ... or something ... has knocked the handset out of position on the coupler? Maybe V'ger has some trouble with Tribbles?

Hey, don't knock acoustic couplers: the last one I used (ca 1980) screamed along at 300b/s.......

But it's probably easier than remote support to certain parts of the world (generally defined as a location where they share their screen on which they have remoted into another host and from there remoted into another host which has some access to the device you actually care about), where the latency is so bad that you can type a whole command line before a single character appears, and you get 10% character loss - so you really have to type at one character every 6 or so seconds (substantially longer if one of the characters doesn't make it, since you need to be confident of the timeout and then start again).

At least 41 hours is so much latency that it's "plan the message, send the message, go home for the weekend"

Updating puts the "Oh no!" moment into a different timescale.....

"plan the message, send the message, go home for the [night]"

A fair few commentards, like me, would have worked along very similar lines back in the day.

Write & polish your code. Submit it to the overnight processing queue on the mainframe. Only find out the next day just how badly bugged it all was.

Instant compilation of code changed the very nature of writing code. Previously we tried to get it as correct as we could visually validate it as being correct, then asked the computer if it would graciously spare some time to compile the code. After the transition to pretty much interactive compilation we could offload a lot of the visual checking to the compiler itself.

We were luckier - 2 hour turnaround.

Re latency

Sounds like any machine with Mcafee on it.

It amazes me that it's still sending after all this time. Even more so that we're still able to recieve it.

It does make me wonder what they've made their capacitors from for them to last this long (considering some start wobbling after 1,000 hours nevermind 276,000 hours and counting.)

See title!

Lister: Oh God, aliens... Your explanation for anything slightly peculiar is aliens, isn't it? You lose your keys - it's aliens. A picture falls off the wall - it's aliens. That time we used up a whole bog roll in a day, you thought that was aliens as well!

Well we didn't use it all, Lister. Who did?

I love reading these stories about the Voyager program, it's incredible how well designed and built it was to still be functioning so well so long past it's original requirements.

I too think the Voyager expeditions are exceptional in their continuing achievements.

The modern argument is to build for a specified lifetime if it makes it cheaper, lighter, faster. Anything more is 'over-engineered'. The opportunities to extend the project beyond the expected lifetime as techniques develop is never part of the original plan.

Some of these space probes have become icons of inventiveness.

160 bits per second, and signals take 20 hours and 33 minutes to reach the probe. Yes – that means round trip latency of 41 hours and six minutes.

Pretty sure some off the newest websites run at those speeds and only get away with it because they are relying on your phone etc to have mega powers.

Pretty sure some off the newest websites run at those speeds and only get away with it because they are relying on your phone etc to have mega powers. Well, it is "highly important" to badly replicate standard browser functionality using several hundred Mb of competing imported JavaScript libraries.

The expected life span of Voyager is, and was, 70-80 years -- the period over which it will have enough power to signal earth. After that the golden plate is expected to last billions of years. The plate is part of the original mission, so you could say that is it's 'expected lifespan', but since this is an IT/computer article, I think that the 70~80 year figure is fair enough.

For some scientists, V1 has already hit it's expected lifespan, since they turned off one of the instruments last year, at around about the expected time.

Some parts of the original mission happened long ago, but it's fanciful to suggest that NASA 'expected' V1 or V2 to suddenly fail after the first part of the mission. They would have been seriously disappointed if one of them had failed early, and they are understandably chuffed that they have lasted so well, but that's not to say that they expected them to fail before the power runs out -- if that had been true, they would have saved weight and money by including a smaller power supply.

Minor niggle:

The golden plate / plaque was on the Pioneer spacecraft. The Voyagers have the golden records.