Fabio Manganiello on Nostr: The engineers who designed the #Voyager probes half a century ago even thought of the ...
The engineers who designed the #Voyager probes half a century ago even thought of the possibility that a wrong sequence of commands may point the antenna dish away from earth.
And they implemented a self-adjusting mechanism that a few times a year scans the positions of a few known stars to infer the position of the earth, and point back the antenna in the right direction.
50 years later, these wonderful machines are still working, tens of billions of km away from earth, and even a wrong sequence of commands won't put them out of use.
The more I understand how they were designed, the more I feel like an early Medieval engineer looking at the Pantheon or other marvels or Roman architecture. Some amazing skills, knowledge and attention to details have been lost from that generation to ours.
And they implemented a self-adjusting mechanism that a few times a year scans the positions of a few known stars to infer the position of the earth, and point back the antenna in the right direction.
50 years later, these wonderful machines are still working, tens of billions of km away from earth, and even a wrong sequence of commands won't put them out of use.
The more I understand how they were designed, the more I feel like an early Medieval engineer looking at the Pantheon or other marvels or Roman architecture. Some amazing skills, knowledge and attention to details have been lost from that generation to ours.