- Voyager still operates using assembly code written almost half a century ago.
- NASA today maintains interstellar spacecraft with less memory than a smartphone image
- The engineers who built Voyager are disappearing faster than the spacecraft itself
Launched in 1977, NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft continues to operate with onboard computers running assembly language written for custom General Electric processors.
Each spacecraft carries three separate computing systems, with a total memory of about 64 to 70 kilobytes across all three—less storage than a single small image file on a modern smartphone. today.
NASA’s Suzy Dodd has compared the operation of Voyager to the flight of an Apple II, capturing how primitive computing resources have become by modern standards.
What spaceship really works and why language is important
Popular shorthand often says that Voyager runs on Fortran, but that description confuses two different things.
The spacecraft’s low-level flight work depends on assembly language programming on highly specialized hardware designed in the early 1970s.
Fortran has been associated with older ground systems and mission tools, not the onboard flight software itself.
When NASA looked for a replacement engineer in 2015, the job position covered both assembly language skills and a deep understanding of the spacecraft’s unique hardware architecture.
Forty-nine years of continuous operations have produced knowledge gaps that matter far more than the programming language itself.
Around the start of the interstellar mission after Voyager 2’s Neptune flyby in August 1989, the flight software was updated to make each spacecraft more autonomous.
That version, augmented by scripts the team uploads every few months, is the basis for what is now running on both probes.
However, the equipment has shrunk and aged dramatically over the decades, and much of the original paper documentation has been lost or fragmented over time.
The original engineers are no longer available to help
Larry Zottarelli was the last original Voyager engineer still working on the project when he retired in 2016 at the age of 80.
All the other original engineers are either dead or over 90, like Dr. Gary Flandro, a career/aerospace engineer now living in retirement.
Dodd said Living science in early 2024 that the people who built the spaceship are no longer alive, leaving a shrinking team to maintain a code that no one fully understands.
Voyager’s signal now takes more than 23 hours to reach Earth, and by the time NASA receives its next status check, the spacecraft will already be 1.5 million kilometers farther into interstellar space.
The mission continues, but the institutional memory that built it is fading faster than the plutonium energy sources that keep the probes alive.
Each year that passes takes more of that knowledge with it, and when the last engineer who understands assembly code retires or dies, NASA will be left with paper documentation, a fading signal, and a spacecraft that no one alive can actually repair.
Via SpaceDaily
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