I ran a few research tasks at JPL, small dollar studies.
We'd often recruit part time work from engineers around the lab through informal networks, (instead of the official channels that segment by "specialization").
One year, one of the developers on my task was the apparently last person who could encode the command sequences for Voyager 2 (hoping memory serves me correctly - event though it was only 8 years ago). She would occasionally come late to meetings because they were dealing with some trouble with the old satellite.
Pretty amazing how little is set aside for these projects that most the staff keeping it alive have "day jobs". I hope she's still uploading
bcraven•18m ago
Ah, good, an opportunity to recommend It's Quieter in the Twilight (2022). Beautiful documentary.
It would be fun to hand over these spacecrafts to a couple of frontier models to see what they can do with them. If I had the money I'd fund it :-)
downrightmike•8m ago
you don't have $20/mo?
xingped•5m ago
...did you seriously just say that? These spacecraft were developed with increidble expertise and intentionality. Give it to a "frontier model" and they'll destroy it faster than you can blink.
nofunsir•1m ago
What does this even mean? Hand our remote controlled flying nuclear powered Von Neumann state machine sensors over to matrix multiplication?
jvanderbot•30m ago
One year, one of the developers on my task was the apparently last person who could encode the command sequences for Voyager 2 (hoping memory serves me correctly - event though it was only 8 years ago). She would occasionally come late to meetings because they were dealing with some trouble with the old satellite.
Pretty amazing how little is set aside for these projects that most the staff keeping it alive have "day jobs". I hope she's still uploading