Ode to Engineering

It is summer and the nights up north are warmer. That makes it a great time to observe the sky. My loyal readers will know, it has become a recurring pattern to sneak an astronomy article in here from time to time. (Check out Looking back to the future and A Midsummer Night's Dream). I do this to bring a perspective from deep space down to Earth.

Let me call your attention to some stellar phenomena, particularly two man-made objects which have traveled to the furthest reaches of space. These are two space probes: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. A little trivia for you: despite the way they are numbered, Voyager 2 was launched to space 16 days before Voyager 1. Both probes have been in space for close to 46 years and have traveled close to 20 billion km. To put this in human perspective, the project scientist Edward Stone retired after 50 years working on this project (Imagine having the same job for 50 years!).

Another thing to consider: How do you build a device, which can operate a few degrees from absolute 0 for 46 years (and counting), without replacing a battery? (Time for another bit of  trivia: The coldest place of all is actually here on Earth inside the quantum computers. In order for the quantum computer to function, the temperature is 10 to 15 milli-Kelvin. That's -459 degrees Fahrenheit or −273 degrees Celsius.)

But why bring this topic up right now?

On July 21, a series of commands were sent to the spacecraft (BTW, the signal to or from the Earth now has to travel 18.5 hours before it is received). One of the commands was to point the antenna 2 degrees away from Earth. However, since the communication had been cut, there was no way to send another command to reverse the command. The damage was done… or was it?

Thanks to brilliant engineering, the disaster was avoided. In this case, one of the safety mechanisms built into the 'brain' of the probe makes sure it conducts an automatic realignment if the probe loses communication. This realignment would occur in October, 2023.

Before that the NASA team tried another trick. After losing the communication, they were still able to detect the signal. It was a very faint signal, but at least they knew that the probe was still functioning properly. The trick?  'Flood' the space around the probe with a signal instructing the probe to align its antenna. And it worked! On August 4, NASA was able to reestablish full communication with the spacecraft.

One can only admire the ingenuity of all the people who built these spacecraft in the 1970s, calculated the trajectory and have kept it going for 46 years. They had additional foresight regarding the message on board of the spacecraft - in case of an encounter with some other intelligent civilization. This was significantly improved, compared to the previous attempts of Pioneer 10 and 11, where we sent porn to the stars. This time we sent an LP with recorded sounds, music and images.

I am not sure how the space beings will react to that, but I think in another 20 years nobody on Earth would know what to make of it. Perhaps NASA should consider sending updates for that. I think it proves the point that rocket scientists are great at designing rockets and not at having conversational skills to communicate with others.

Despite all the negativity we get exposed to in the media, humanity is capable of imagining and building amazing things, discovering the world around us and moving our understanding of things forward. That's the recurrent pattern we sometimes miss.