The First Interstellar Software Update - The Insane Hack That Saved Voyager 1

They could have used my help. I was hand coding my homemade computer for years in the 70s not having access to a compiler or assembler. I ate that stuff for breakfast and could interpret hex code in my head. An emulator wouldn't be that hard to knock up.

“ Voyagers are destined, perhaps for all eternity, to wonder the Cosmos carrying with them the only traces of our human existence”. — Carol Meier.

just knowing its overclocked makes everything worth it

Thanks for not dumming down the explanation. I loved this video, one of your best videos.
Complex topic, interesting engineering. Condensed into a short enough video that I can watch it while eating breakfast without cutting out too much detail. Fenomenal.

This goes so hard.

Loved the format of this.

Won’t AI like chatpgt or whatever make searching all the years and years of documents a lot easier?

I find it amazing the technology built in the 70s is still pushing on. A testament to the people who designed, tested, and built the equipment. Wow.

I didn't understand most of this but it was amazing to watch. Still boggles my mind the Voyagers are still running, let alone the fact they hacked Voyager 1 to fix it. I hope in 20 or 30 years New Horizons is still going.

wow, and I was mad because my thesis paper lost a page of text!!!!

I was 2 when the Voyager probes went up so, to me, they've always been there. I love these machines and it's gonna be sad when we stop hearing from them, especially since no probes with such a wide mission were sent since.

Thank you for the wonderfully detailed explanation. I did a lot of assembly programming on Honeywell 16-bit minicomputers in the 1970s, and many of the ideas are very similar. Debugging based on a full memory dump is probably almost a lost art, but I'm glad it hasn't been completely forgotten. Congratulations for describing the issues so clearly without hand waving.

Great video Scott! Keep up the good work! 😊

Absolutely superb story and so well put together and narrated 👍

Fantastic break down of the event.

The phrase 'Hello world' is set to a completely New context from now on!

Incredible information! Thanks Scott!

Fxxx out !
sends data to output

Everybody that has ever done assembly level debugging will agree that this is the ultimate engineering trophy. Well done!

GREAT SHOW! Really well done!

A wonderful explanation of a complex situation. It will be a sad day when the last Voyager goes silent. Other other hand, it has been, and continues to be, an incredible journey of exploring the Cosmos. Carl Sagan would be very proud of the dedicated and crafty NASA team.

I know next to nothing about computers so take this with a grain of salt, but if they have a list of commands, and what they do, and they know the general stats of the computer, like it's memory and all that, what's stopping the engineers from making their own emulator?

This video must be seriously preserved by qualified museum professionals so humanity doesn't loose this amazing story. Congrats to everyone involved in this feat, from the conception of the Voyager to the team that it's working on it to this day!

Oh yea, it's scott manley time

There should've been four Voyager probes launched not two.

It's strange to think that I was a teenager when Voyager 1 launched.

Thank you for the memories of my university days. Assembler code will live on in voyager until we get warp drive. Great work by the team to keep mankind’s probe into space alive. (Hello world😊)

The song in the chapter intros is Frenchies - God From Above, by the way.

using "-wireshark/airshark -"vacuumshark to debug packets...

I’m curious as to why the original voyager design team didn’t build an identical computer on earth for events like these. Seems like a trivial thing to do. Even the latest mars rovers have whole replicas here at JPL.

“My battery is low and it's getting dark”

Insane how real these look!

Wow. Great episode. Great explanation.

Yes 2030 seems possible however we could get engineering data for a few years after that and that can tell us something about the space between voyager and Earth. Back in around 2000 the projected end of voyager was 2020

As a graphic designer this vid was so f ing cool 😂

Is it really true they didn't put together an emulator?! How did they test code?

That was one hell of a hackathon. Thanks for the brilliant explanation!

"Have you tried turning it off and on again?" LOL

Scott you are pronouncing contiguous wrong😊

amazing. And yet, stupid influencers are more known and celebrated than actual thinking engineers.

History lost and found shows its value. Amazing story of why it is useful to put records in places and in forms that can be found and understood by later generations. Real science history with a touch of Mayan glyph. Great story.

I love the amount of details in this video

First long video of anything I've seen in a while lol. Back in HS I was in our first astronomy class, I actually did a report on the Voagers. I'm glad I did, space is awesome, people are awesome.

Eu nunca produzi droga nenhuma nessa vida e esses caras produziram esse computador com a tecnologia dos anos 70! Puta que pariu! Sou um inutil!

I remember when the Voyager images came through in the late 70s as I was just out of high school. Later I learned assembly language in college in the early 80s and I’m glad I did because I was able to and interested in following this entire episode. What an incredible journey and achievement.

maudlin is not scotts natural speaking style