Here is a sceanerio worth putting your mind to.
Imagine you're in charge of a computer that is 40 years old. That's right, a computer right out of the Atari age.
As fantastical as it sounds, that is exactly the problem facing NASA's voyager mission now that the last remaining engineer Larry Zottarelli is retiring at the age of eighty.
We have established that Voyager1 (which in 2013 left the the solar system completely) is indeed old, (it is amazing that the craft is operational at all!) but it is also an amagingly far from Earth at somewhere near 15 billion miles!
Suzy Dodd, Voyager1's present project manager, says flying voyager1 is like flying an Apple II computer.
At launch Voyager1 hefted a beefy 64kb of memory. Not megabytes, not gigabytes but sixty four Kilo Bytes! It's data is recorded on an eight track tape!
Imagine you're in charge of a computer that is 40 years old. That's right, a computer right out of the Atari age.
As fantastical as it sounds, that is exactly the problem facing NASA's voyager mission now that the last remaining engineer Larry Zottarelli is retiring at the age of eighty.
We have established that Voyager1 (which in 2013 left the the solar system completely) is indeed old, (it is amazing that the craft is operational at all!) but it is also an amagingly far from Earth at somewhere near 15 billion miles!
Suzy Dodd, Voyager1's present project manager, says flying voyager1 is like flying an Apple II computer.
At launch Voyager1 hefted a beefy 64kb of memory. Not megabytes, not gigabytes but sixty four Kilo Bytes! It's data is recorded on an eight track tape!
There are so many more nothing short of amazing data points about Voyager1, one is a wonder the
craft continues to fly at all!
Check out the Fox 40 online article HERE to get to the original article.
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