Voyager's 15 Billion Mile Software Update

Have you ever wondered how NASA updates Voyager's software from 15 billion miles away? Or how Voyager's memories are stored? In this video, we dive deeper into the incredible story of how a small team of engineers managed to keep Voyager alive, as well as how NASA could perform a software update on a computer that's been cruising through space for almost half a century.

So tune in to learn more about Voyager’s 15 billion mile software update, and stick around until the end for your chance to win in the next exciting giveaway!

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Short on time? Feel free to skip ahead in this video using the chapter links below.

00:00 Voyager's 15 Billion Mile Software Update
01:27 Voyager's Computer System
04:00 How Voyager's Software Works
05:51 Voyager Programming Languages
07:00 Voyager Updates and Patches

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References:

3D Modeler: Orkun Zengin

Music used in this video:

To Loom Is To Love - The Mini Vandals
Inspiring Cinematic Asia - Lexin Music
Lemon Drops ft. Jacquire King - Stephan Sharp
Amalthea - Van Sandano
Go Down Swinging - NEFFEX
Stratosphere Voyage - Spirits Of Our Dreams

#NASA #NasaUpdates #Voyager

[JimmyZNJ]

As a software engineer for several decades, I have great respect for the technical complexity the Voyager team has dealt with over the many years. Voyager never ceases to impress and inspire me as to what is possible!

[pjimmbojimmbo]

Launched over 45 yrs ago and still ticking. The Engineers that designed it, and those that keep it running, certainly deserve a Round of Applause.

Edit/addon
The Voyagers, and the Pioneers, will likely be the Only Things created on Earth that will still Exist, long after the Earth is gone

[OlNoName]

Old computers always impress me more than modern ones because it felt like they were pushing waaay beyond their limit, one super basic computer doing so much. And to see it still running is incredible

[alanlowe]

50 years ago I was writing perfectly functional control programs in assembly language where I only had 1kb of memory. When they upgraded to a 2kb memory, I thought it was amazing and allowed me to put so much more functionality into the program. If I had the 70kb of Voyager's memory to play with, that would have felt like an infinite amount of space at the time.

[varmaranjeet]

50 years ago 70 KB of memory took voyager across the solar system.
Today - my HP laptop with 16 GB RAM cannot run Chrome without getting stuck at least once.

Much respect to the engineers of that age and to the team that built this incredible masterpiece ❤

[joeyager]

I'm a retired machine designer and it's incredible that the Voyagers are still operating today and that IT engineers can keep these spacecraft updated to continue to perform at a high level for almost 50 years. Also, not too often mentioned, much credit should go to the craftsmen, machinists and assemblers that put these together. Excellent work!

[karlnielsen]

I'll be honest, I normally can't stand sponsorship plugs. However, the sponsorship transition in this video: "Voyager runs the latest version of NordVPN...not really", this genuinely made me smile and chuckle. Well done.

[Mesazane]

It's insane how things from 50 years ago still work like this. Applause to the engineers and programmers who made and maintained the voyager until now.

[ASMMEGY]

As an Egyptian Astronomer who is interested in the twin Voyagers since decades, this is one of the best videos on the internet EVER about the twin probes. Great respects to the channel.

[hawkeyegaming]

Hats off to all the engineers and scientists who worked on voyager mission. I'm sure there will be many more incredible missions in space exploration but Voyager is the best thing done by mankind for space exploration

[matthewgumabon]

I image the people recruited by NASA to do this update as actual wizards.
Masters of forgotten (programming) languages tasked with bringing an ancient machine adrift in the void realm back to life…
Absolutely epic

[LVNCHBOXXX]

bro 15 billion miles away? i dont even get good wifi from my router upstairs....

[superamario]

Voyager 1 and 2 have this aura about them for me. Its like a reverence with absolute wonder over the era in which they were built, deployed and still out there today. I do get misty eyed, especially around August 20th and always wish Voyager 2 a happy birthday

[utkarsharora]

I am totally amazed how the transistors made 50 years ago still function as intended. It would be nice if a voyager 3 could observe the Oort Cloud and be capable enough to send some photos back to Earth.

[rolandschweiger]

born 1970 i grew up with Commodore64 and as a youth did lots of programming in Assembly on the 6510 processor and i learnt the most profound things about computer architecture at that time. No direct connection to Voyager but i do still today have the look and feel of how detailled you have to work when writing assembly language programs, carefully using the interrupts with polling, making no mistakes with jump and compare instructions etc. my deepest respect for the engineers of Voyager!

[jayski]

I'm 70 years old and although I never worked as a programmer, but I remember learning Assembler for the early Intel processors. And as some have mentioned below, I can remember working on key punch machines that created stacks of "IBM" cards. Each card held one line of code. You submitted the whole stack to a computer center and came back the next day to see if your program ran. One tiny little syntax error, on one card, and that's where the whole thing would stop. Needless to say we've come a long way. But on the bright side, there was no such thing as malware or viruses in those days.

[williambrasky]

Fortran and assembly aren’t “from the 40s and 50s.” Fortran was developed at IBM in the 50s, yes, but assembly is still used in every computer even today. Computers in the 40s used punch cards and some were even physically rewired for “programming.”
Also what you described later in the video as “pseudocode” isn’t. It’s called a function or a subroutine. Pseudocode describes shorthand to outline the flow of a program before it is written in actual code.

[larryandrews]

Funny, to us old timers, 70K was a massive amount of memory to use on this spacecraft. A PDP-8 minicomputer could support 4-users running Basic programming support using Terminet terminals and 32K of core memory. Each user having about 4K of memory. I would load 10 words from the PDP-8 front-panel, which would setup the bootstrap papertape reel to load the OS and program into the 32K of core memory. The 32K of core memory with its hand-made magnetwire-wound Toroidal cores, was a beautiful sight of workmanship for many.

[stefanbuscaylet]

I’ve been involved in design of flash memory and associated SSDs and its pretty much the same basic concept as in voyager just our industry today makes a single flash die with a terabit of memory cells vs 17Kb. I’m super impressed they seemed to have gone away without any error detection/correction on their non-volatile memory and they certainly got lucky when they did have a bit flip that they found a way to recover it. I’d love for NASA to open source their software for Voyager if only to just let the world these old machines were made so reliable. Some either long retired and/or passed along engineers that built this non-volatile memory really need to receive the recognition for a job well done!

[Bax]

Incredible how we have managed to extend the life of the voyager missions decades beyond their planned lifespans. Thanks for the incredibly insightful video. 👍