Why NASA Needs a Programmer Fluent In 60-Year-Old Languages

Why NASA Needs a Programmer Fluent In 60-Year-Old Languages


Larry Zottarelli, the last original Voyager engineer still on the project, is retiring after a long and storied history at JPL. While there are still a few hands around who worked on the original project, now the job of keeping this now-interstellar spacecraft going will fall to someone else. And that someone needs to have some very specific skills.

Yes, it’s going to require coding, but it won’t be in Ruby on Rails or Python. Not C or C++. Go a little further back, to the assembly languages used in early computing. Know Cobol? Can you breeze through Fortran? Remember your Algol? Those fancy new languages from the late 1950s? Then you might be the person for the job.

“It was state of the art in 1975, but that’s basically 40 years old if you want to think of it that way,” Suzanne Dodd, program manager for the Voyager program, said in a phone interview. “Although, some people can program in assembly language and understand the intricacy of the spacecraft, most younger people can’t or really don’t want to.​”

As the new engineer, you have a few tasks ahead of you and about 64 kilobytes of memory to work with. The Voyager twins sport NASA’s earliest on-board computers, a step away from the sequencers used on projects like ISEE-3. A sequencer uses radio or audio tones to turn on an instrument but with an onboard computer, more functions can be automatic, which is especially helpful if your spacecraft is more than 12 billion miles away—17 hours by radio—and only certain antennas work with it. Voyager 2, now moving downward from the ecliptic of the solar system, can only be reached by the Canberra antenna of the Deep Space Network.

The last true software overhaul was in 1990, after the 1989 Neptune encounter and at the beginning of the interstellar mission. “​The flight software was basically completely re-written in order to have a spacecraft that could be nearly autonomous and continue sending back data to us even if we lost communication with it,” Dodd said. “It has a looping routine of activities that it does automatically on board and then we augment that with sequences that we send up every three months.​”

Both spacecrafts are “very healthy for senior citizens” Dodd says and they have enough power left to run for another decade, though beyond that the future is uncertain. To try and prolong their lives, a new engineer would have to help figure out a way to make a sort of “energy audit” from afar, check to see the energy requirements of remaining instruments, and help institute shutdown procedures that make the most of what’s left of the onboard energy.

“​[The original engineers] said, ‘This subsystem takes 3.2 watts of power.’ Well, it really took 3 watts, but they wanted to be conservative when they built the spacecraft,” Dodd says. “Now, we are at the point in the mission where we are trying to get rid of the margins and get the actual numbers.”

That’s when it’s time to turn back to old documents to figure out the logic behind some of the engineering decisions. Dodd says it’s easy to find the engineering decisions, but harder to find the reasoning. This means combing through secondary documents and correspondence hoping to find the solution, trying to get in another engineer’s head.

NASA's Voyager Probes Still Healthy After Nearly 4 Decades in Space

NASA's Voyager Probes Still Healthy After Nearly 4 Decades in Space

NASA’s Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft are still going strong after nearly 37 years in space.

“Both spacecraft are still operating, still very healthy. I guess as healthy as we are at the table right now,” Suzanne Dodd, the Voyager project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) said, drawing a big laugh from the audience at the SpaceFest VI conference in Pasadena, California, on May 11.

Dodd was fresh out of college in 1985 when JPL recruited her as it geared up for Voyager 2’s upcoming encounter with Uranus. Nearly 30 years later, she is project manager of the Voyager Interstellar Mission under which the two spacecraft continue to explore the vast expanse of space beyond the planets.

Voyager 1 Spacecraft Enters New Realm at Solar System's Edge

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has discovered a new layer of the solar system that scientists hadn't known was there, researchers announced today (Dec. 3).

Voyager 1 and its sister probe Voyager 2 have been traveling through space since 1977, and are close to becoming the first manmade objects to leave the solar system.

via megalextoria.com

Voyager approaches edge of solar system

Based on new data from the craft, NASA announced last week that Voyager 1 was nearing the “heliopause,” which scientists believe is the border between our solar system and interstellar space, says NASA research scientist Eric Christian in Greenbelt, Md.

via megalextoria.com

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