NASA Just Sent an OTA Software Update to a 47-Year-Old Spacecraft

[Mach-Lee]

Here's some inspiration for the Ford OTA engineers:

https://www.space.com/voyager-1-communications-update-april-2024

Voyager 1 is still sending back data from outside the solar system, but it stopped about five months ago. NASA was able to get a readout of the spacecraft's memory, and discovered memory corruption. NASA then crafted an OTA software update (probably in ancient FORTRAN assembly language) that would reprogram the memory chip while avoiding the corrupt areas. They were successful sending the OTA update across 15 billion miles of space, and Voyager 1 is back to sending data again! Still going...

So whaddaya think Ford, will we still get OTAs in the year 2070? Maybe that BlueCruise update by then? ?

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[CarsIMBwife]

Yes, I’m ancient ?, I learned Fortran 77 on the job in 1980 (and coded in various languages until retiring in 2022). My guess is they used Assembly code. A more machine language code that can communicate more specifically with the hardware.

 

[EELinneman]

It's assembler code, not Fortran. The option to recall and fix the satellite is a bit difficult considering that it takes 20 hours to send a signal there! I have a friend at JPL who told me years ago they were struggling to build a simulator of the onboard computer for testing.

I'm guessing that in 2070, Ford will still be delaying Blue Cruise for version 28.3 wich will be amazing when they deliver it!

 

[AngryMan]

Here's some inspiration for the Ford OTA engineers:

https://www.space.com/voyager-1-communications-update-april-2024

Voyager 1 is still sending back data from outside the solar system, but it stopped about five months ago. NASA was able to get a readout of the spacecraft's memory, and discovered memory corruption. NASA then crafted an OTA software update (probably in ancient FORTRAN assembly language) that would reprogram the memory chip while avoiding the corrupt areas. They were successful sending the OTA update across 15 billion miles of space, and Voyager 1 is back to sending data again! Still going...

So whaddaya think Ford, will we still get OTAs in the year 2070? Maybe that BlueCruise update by then? ?

Id settle for them finally completing the stupid Tesla charger update on my GT

 

[timbop]

I'm guessing that if you paid $500,000,000 for your car then Ford would get the OTAs right every time, too.

 

[joemache]

Yes, I’m ancient ?, I learned Fortran 77 on the job in 1980 (and coded in various languages until retiring in 2022). My guess is they used Assembly code. A more machine language code that can communicate more specifically with the hardware.

That's fascinating, @CarsIMBwife! Your experience with Fortran 77 and various other languages must have given you a unique perspective on the evolution of coding over the years. It's incredible to think that Assembly code, being closer to machine language, could be used to communicate with a spacecraft billions of miles away. Here's hoping Ford takes a leaf out of NASA's book and keeps their OTA updates coming for decades to come! ?

 

[timbop]

Yes, I’m ancient ?, I learned Fortran 77 on the job in 1980 (and coded in various languages until retiring in 2022). My guess is they used Assembly code. A more machine language code that can communicate more specifically with the hardware.

I joined an Explorer post (division of boy scouts) started by RCA in 1981 (freshman year of HS), and they taught us Fortran 77. We started out using acoustic-coupled modems on line printers with keyboards, but after a short while they gave us access to serial dumb terminals. It was pretty cool, except that they would purge whatever we wrote on the weekends so we couldn't really do anything too sophisticated - which is probably why it died out within a couple of years. I still name my temporary integers i, j, etc.

It came in handy when I started college - the intro computer science class was fortran and I just went to the prof and and took the final at the beginning of the semester and he let me skip all the classes. Easiest A I ever got.

 

[CarsIMBwife]

I joined an Explorer post (division of boy scouts) started by RCA in 1981 (freshman year of HS), and they taught us Fortran 77. We started out using acoustic-coupled modems on line printers with keyboards, but after a short while they gave us access to serial dumb terminals. It was pretty cool, except that they would purge whatever we wrote on the weekends so we couldn't really do anything too sophisticated - which is probably why it died out within a couple of years. I still name my temporary integers i, j, etc.

It came in handy when I started college - the intro computer science class was fortran and I just went to the prof and and took the final at the beginning of the semester and he let me skip all the classes. Easiest A I ever got.

Yes! That was my first WFH experience. Had a TI Silent 700 and had to borrow a regular phone because I had a trimline and it wouldn’t fit into the couplers. All work done with a ‘terminal’ and line editor. I was programming before CRTs and PCs.

 

[mdolan92869]

Yes! That was my first WFH experience. Had a TI Silent 700 and had to borrow a regular phone because I had a trimline and it wouldn’t fit into the couplers. All work done with a ‘terminal’ and line editor. I was programming before CRTs and PCs.

Something about that picture was gnawing at me. Finally think I figured it out. The dial is backwards. 1 should be where 9 is, etc. That's why the 909 area code was the worst for actual dialing. 9 clicks, 10 clicks, 9 clicks. Whereas 212 for NYC was 2 clicks, 1 click, 2 clicks.

 

[CarsIMBwife]

Something about that picture was gnawing at me. Finally think I figured it out. The dial is backwards. 1 should be where 9 is, etc. That's why the 909 area code was the worst for actual dialing. 9 clicks, 10 clicks, 9 clicks. Whereas 212 for NYC was 2 clicks, 1 click, 2 clicks.

Just pulled a picture from the internet, figured most people have no idea about ancient history

 

[mdolan92869]

Just pulled a picture from the internet, figured most people have no idea about ancient history

A friend of mine had an acoustic coupler for his Apple ][, but I started with FORTRAN on a DEC-System(no VAX/VMS yet) running TOPS-10 OS (?) in '78 or '79 in college, no dial up for me. Learned BASIC by copying the system games locally and editing them so I could shoot the Klingons 100% of the time! How I hate line editors!

 

[P. T. Magoo]

As a rehab professional sometimes working with clients who've had neurological injuries, the parallels are fascinating. NASA is doing essentially what your brain has to do after a stroke or a traumatic head injury: re-mapping and re-configuring the system to remove a damaged set of circuits and replace them with other, heretofore unused or differently used circuits.

Cool thing about a brain or biologic nervous system is, after an injury to an area, the whole system becomes more plastic, more child-like and re-configurable. Pretty cool survival attribute built into our circuitry.

What a cool project for some team though, building a model of a long-obsolete system, reconfiguring it with obsolete (I assume) language, and then successfully pulling off the same procedure over billions of miles!

 

[timbop]

We used Decwriter III's to start with, then they finally let us use the dumb terminals.

The next semester I got to take compsci at our (advanced for its time) high school writing RPG-2 for an IBM System32. I was lucky - the previous year they replaced the punchcards with 8" floppy disk readers.

To answer the question: I've lived through 2 revolutions - first the PC revolution and then the creation of object oriented languages. Of course now we're all beginning the AI revolution. However, most ideas seem to recycle - techniques and philosophies go in and out of vogue but the core principles discovered in the 60's and 70's still hold up. Binary trees, linked lists, arrays - all are still heavily used.

The same goes for the design of languages: Fortran was very tightly data type specific, and slowly languages tended to be less strict on data types culminating in javascript and other languages like it where data types are ridiculously flexible. After it was realized that not knowing what type a variable is can actually make it harder to code and lead to bugs, the pendulum is swinging back. Now typescript and others are bringing back the utility of specifying the data type for args and variables, allowing compilers to help you find logic bugs again.

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