Where would you send Voyager today? - Shoutout to NordVPN for supporting this vid, check them out here: nordvpn.com/primalspace

As a software engineer for several decades, I have great respect for the technical complexity the Voyager team has dealt with over the many years. Voyager never ceases to impress and inspire me as to what is possible!

50 years ago 70 KB of memory took voyager across the solar system. Today - my HP laptop with 16 GB RAM cannot run Chrome without getting stuck at least once. Much respect to the engineers of that age and to the team that built this incredible masterpiece ❤

Old computers always impress me more than modern ones because it felt like they were pushing waaay beyond their limit, one super basic computer doing so much. And to see it still running is incredible

I'm a retired machine designer and it's incredible that the Voyagers are still operating today and that IT engineers can keep these spacecraft updated to continue to perform at a high level for almost 50 years. Also, not too often mentioned, much credit should go to the craftsmen, machinists and assemblers that put these together. Excellent work!

I'll be honest, I normally can't stand sponsorship plugs. However, the sponsorship transition in this video: "Voyager runs the latest version of NordVPN...not really", this genuinely made me smile and chuckle. Well done.

50 years ago I was writing perfectly functional control programs in assembly language where I only had 1kb of memory. When they upgraded to a 2kb memory, I thought it was amazing and allowed me to put so much more functionality into the program. If I had the 70kb of Voyager's memory to play with, that would have felt like an infinite amount of space at the time.

I image the people recruited by NASA to do this update as actual wizards. Masters of forgotten (programming) languages tasked with bringing an ancient machine adrift in the void realm back to life… Absolutely epic

As an Egyptian Astronomer who is interested in the twin Voyagers since decades, this is one of the best videos on the internet EVER about the twin probes. Great respects to the channel.

Launched over 45 yrs ago and still ticking. The Engineers that designed it, and those that keep it running, certainly deserve a Round of Applause. Edit/addon The Voyagers, and the Pioneers, will likely be the Only Things created on Earth that will still Exist, long after the Earth is gone

It's insane how things from 50 years ago still work like this. Applause to the engineers and programmers who made and maintained the voyager until now.

The very first programming language I learned, almost 50 years ago, was Fortran, followed later by CDC Cyber 6000 assembly, and, much later, 6502 and 8086 assembly. There's no way I would be qualified to write programs for the Voyagers, but it's nice to dream...even at my age.

It just blows my mind that both Voyagers are still operational. Superb engineering 👏

I am totally amazed how the transistors made 50 years ago still function as intended. It would be nice if a voyager 3 could observe the Oort Cloud and be capable enough to send some photos back to Earth.

Hats off to all the engineers and scientists who worked on voyager mission. I'm sure there will be many more incredible missions in space exploration but Voyager is the best thing done by mankind for space exploration

Fortran has been released only in the late fifties, Assembler is kind of "machine language", can be called a "human readable form of the machine language" of a specific computer type with first systems in the very late forties. Voyager simply is incredible - a system that works for so long, and that still can undergo software updates despite almost impossible data communication by the distance and available power.

That NordVPN segue got me rolling 😂

Voyager 1 and 2 have this aura about them for me. Its like a reverence with absolute wonder over the era in which they were built, deployed and still out there today. I do get misty eyed, especially around August 20th and always wish Voyager 2 a happy birthday

Incredible how we have managed to extend the life of the voyager missions decades beyond their planned lifespans. Thanks for the incredibly insightful video. 👍

born 1970 i grew up with Commodore64 and as a youth did lots of programming in Assembly on the 6510 processor and i learnt the most profound things about computer architecture at that time. No direct connection to Voyager but i do still today have the look and feel of how detailled you have to work when writing assembly language programs, carefully using the interrupts with polling, making no mistakes with jump and compare instructions etc. my deepest respect for the engineers of Voyager!

Every time I see a video of Voyager, I can't help but exclaim, this is really a great engineering miracle, and the more time goes by, the more I admire the scientists and engineers who designed and built this detector.

I'm 70 years old and although I never worked as a programmer, but I remember learning Assembler for the early Intel processors. And as some have mentioned below, I can remember working on key punch machines that created stacks of "IBM" cards. Each card held one line of code. You submitted the whole stack to a computer center and came back the next day to see if your program ran. One tiny little syntax error, on one card, and that's where the whole thing would stop. Needless to say we've come a long way. But on the bright side, there was no such thing as malware or viruses in those days.

Fortran and assembly aren’t “from the 40s and 50s.” Fortran was developed at IBM in the 50s, yes, but assembly is still used in every computer even today. Computers in the 40s used punch cards and some were even physically rewired for “programming.” Also what you described later in the video as “pseudocode” isn’t. It’s called a function or a subroutine. Pseudocode describes shorthand to outline the flow of a program before it is written in actual code.

i cannot comprehend the pure scale, distance and technical ability in this video. this is so insanely impressive.

bro 15 billion miles away? i dont even get good wifi from my router upstairs....

45 years with no physical interaction, and giving how old the technology is, it is very impressive.

I’ve been involved in design of flash memory and associated SSDs and its pretty much the same basic concept as in voyager just our industry today makes a single flash die with a terabit of memory cells vs 17Kb. I’m super impressed they seemed to have gone away without any error detection/correction on their non-volatile memory and they certainly got lucky when they did have a bit flip that they found a way to recover it. I’d love for NASA to open source their software for Voyager if only to just let the world these old machines were made so reliable. Some either long retired and/or passed along engineers that built this non-volatile memory really need to receive the recognition for a job well done!

I really do admire the team who designed Voyager 1 and 2. With the hardware and software resources they had in the 70, it is a genuine tour de force. Hats off! Kudos!

Just love how we’re living this era of human exploration at its peak! And how amazing it is to see such smart and intelligent individuals who not only helped voyager steer back and face earth when it went out of angle but to continually work with something so old. Love it!!

For Voyager 3 I would do a grand tour of the solar system, with the end goal of doing the exact same thing as the original voyagers, with modern hardware. I think that those missions were absolutely awesome!

I'm a software engineer and I have a hard time making programs that run continuously for 2 years in controlled environments here on Earth. For a computer to run continuously for decades millions of miles away from Earth, that's just downright insane. I hope we can keep talking to Voyager for as long as possible! That little probe is the furthest thing away from us humans, and I hope we can use it to learn so much stuff before it finally goes dark and drifts amongst the stars forever.

So stunning. It's amazed how after all those miles the signal can still be decoded and run..

A incredible journey through space. Hats off to the engineers for this achievement of marking a presence outside of solar system..

2:50 omg that sponsor really scared 💀

That sponsor transition made me spit my drink ,you owe me one! 2:57

This was such a well put together video. You explained all the things I had always wondered about but didn’t know where to look or who to ask. And you brought all of the people who worked with assembly and fortran! So awesome to see this interaction. I feel better about my pulsar map tattoo that was on the golden record on V1 :)

Excellent work by the Voyager engineers! It is amazing that Voyager is still operating.

FORTAN was heavily in use all through the 70's, 80' and 90's as a go to for engineering and other math/science purposes. Assembly never dies - it is everywhere - though most program in higher level languages. Assembly in "production" s/w went well into the 80's and 90's though C replaced much of that. Some compilers output to assembly code on their way to object code.

It's incredible how the robustness of the Voyager has allowed it to survive all these years and continue to discover new things

The fact that it has worked this long and reliably is amazing to me and the people that worked on this, the entire team should be incredibly proud!

Fascinating content. Old programmers, like myself, who took our first class in Assembly language back in the 1970s and then wrote applications this content is inspiring. We manually wrote our code on special pads (of paper) then used a keypunch machine to place lines of code onto 80 character per column cards, taking batches of cards over to a card reader, had to be fluent in binary, octal, and hex, and had to be able to read through reams of printed core dumps to diagnose errors. Some programmers were able to mentally translate microcode. Our knowledge evolved over the decades to remain relevant with all the new languages and technology but we never forgot what it was like to drop a container of program code cards on the way to the card reader and spend an hour putting them back in order.

I’m astounded that they were able to build over-the-air updates into the hardware considering the time when it was designed - decades ahead of its time and still going strong 💪

We should send a new Voyager... using all the lessons learned and modern tech. So the future generations can have an amazing device to enjoy as we have today.

I retired in March after a career as a programmer/application developer/software engineer/etc. for about 40 years. The first computer I ever programmed on was an AIM-65 using 6502 assembler. I've watched over the years as programs became more and more bloated and code less and less efficient. "Don't worry about it. Memory is cheap and the processors are fast." I remember when I was a kid groing up and Viking landed on Mars. I got up at 5 in the morning to watch as the first pictures of the Mars surface were sent back. Fascinating. I have always been more intested in the planets than deep space exploration so I would send Voyager on more trips around the outer planets.

I love that you don't oversimplify the technical details, well it still has simplification but for better presentation. Rather than saying "nasa updated the voyager 1 code, by beaming software update to their machine" and not expanding how it's done, you include how it is updated, which language does it use, how was the error, even explained bits of information like pseudocode/instruction (just like x86 instruction) and much more with appealing animation. Very well done

My KSP gobbled 16Gb on RAM and it's only for the lift off. Voyager flew millions of miles with 7Kb.

I was launched 45 years ago as well and I’m still operational. Great engineering! Thanks, dad!

Im still a child/teen and i remember so good when my dad first told me about the voyager program and how far it travelled. For me if i could send a new voyager i would probobly want it to be around Jupiter or Uranus taking pics of them and the moons as they are my favourite planets and so interesting!

Just by thinking at how they managed to create Voyager 50 years ago and still works to this day is just amazing and very inspiring for other people in my opinion. Very big applauses to the engineers and programmers who did the machine.

Voyager Runs on "Nord VPN" you had me with that 😂

As a child, gazing up at the stars while learning about the Voyager spacecraft's incredible journey through the cosmos filled me with a sense of wonder and infinite possibilities. Thank you for bringing back those memories.

I actually asked them about how large of a patch it is, this is what they said: “The patch is quite small; only about 16 instructions. All signals take ~18 hours to get to V2 and over 20 to get to V1 but that's due to their distance not the size of the patch.” ~Calla Cofield

Even by todays standards the engineering that went into Voyager is remarkable. It’s not sexy but the constraints they had to work in to produce this much functionality is an amazing feat.

I'd send the hypothetical Voyager 3 spacecraft to Uranus again, - both for in the name of science and due to sheer nostalgia, since at a personal level, by the time Voyager 2 reached it in 1986, I was already old enough to appreciate the importance of such event - and that made me hooked on following news about its journey through space since - so much so that I could barely await for its rendezvous with equally gelid Neptune three years later.

No ‘built-in obsolescence’ here. Just solid, reliable and efficient engineering and technology. The whole team deserves recognition and thanks from the entire scientific community.

As usual, your segway into a commercial is fantastic. Respect.

I loved this.. The NordVPN was really well done.. You had me for a couple of milliseconds 🙂

I would send voyager III with a trajectory with lots of gravity assists, then I would point it towards Alpha Centauri so that generations in a few thousand years would be able to see what it looks like.

It is truly amazing that it still is possible to update computers on that distance sending the data at 16 bits per second. Can hardly imagine that, nowadays used to gigabit speeds. Also using only 70 kB of memory for keeping the Voyager operative. I used to have a Sinclair ZX 80 with 1 kB many years ago where nowaday GB or TB are standard. Just amazing

Thanks for the amazing content and lets all hope that voyager 3 or something like that will be announced soon!!!

The voyager programme’s longevity is testament to the wonderful skilled professionals who designed, built and programmed them. Humankind’s finest. 👍

I believe we need a mission to the dwarf planets in the Kuiper belt, we know so little about Haumeia, Makemake and Eris but they still are as interesting as anything else.

Gotta say, loved the way you stuck the ad in... kudos..

First time I come across your channel. This video was AMAZING!! You gained a subscriber! Good job!

An amazing peice of human ingenuity and engineering I have huge respect for the people who made it and keeping it running.

What’s amazing is how the voyager is powered. It has a nuclear battery, which just means a radioactive element undergoing permanent fission. Since space is so cold, the ‘reactor’ is kept cool enough to not melt. Here’s the coolest part. It uses the difference in temperature between the battery and space to generate a current. It’s called a thermoelectric effect, where a voltage can be created using temperature differences. It’s crazy.

All the awesome info in this video and the best thing in it was the segue to the sponsor. Bravo 🍻

I don't have any official degree in science or computer language but I am a enthusiastic about science, love to know new things and gather knowledge. This video really makes me amazed about how old technologies still working today even form billions of miles❤️

It’s baffling how they got so far with such a small computer it can’t even store a photo 😮

I'm assuming the Fortran part of the software was part of the build proces, not running on the craft itself.

Its incredible what the early pioneers have accomplished, building hardware and software that has stood for half a century in the harshest environment and still going strong.

Funny, to us old timers, 70K was a massive amount of memory to use on this spacecraft. A PDP-8 minicomputer could support 4-users running Basic programming support using Terminet terminals and 32K of core memory. Each user having about 4K of memory. I would load 10 words from the PDP-8 front-panel, which would setup the bootstrap papertape reel to load the OS and program into the 32K of core memory. The 32K of core memory with its hand-made magnetwire-wound Toroidal cores, was a beautiful sight of workmanship for many.

The Voyager is a living monument, almost all people know about but have not seen, it is a symbol of what we can achieve if we pursue it. Voyager will outlive most of us but I hope that people remember what technological challenges Voyager has overcome to reach its destination. If we could launch another, I would say send it in the opposite direction, with the technology we have today, imagine what more we can equip the modern Voyager.

I would be waaaaay more interested in how they properly direct a beam of RF to go to Voyager's position and have enough strength at that distance, in the first place.

Great video, the stunning visuals really bring home this truly staggering achievement. It shows what can be accomplished by humanity when we are not butchering each other.

A great example of complex design distilled down to a simple approach.

It's amazing how we can still get updates for voyager. Amazing

Hats off to the 3D designer you have in the team. Brilliant! 👏

thats nuts and amazing at the same time

I think sending a Voyager 3 to the inner most planets would be neat. Gathering more data on Mercury and Venus would allow us to learn more about them.

Man.. really well explained.. and we need more missions like the voyagers

I did my electrical/electronics engineering 4 year degree graduating in 1980. Learnt Fortran and programmed Motorola 6802 microprocessors using machine code without assemblers. I have been privileged to live and observe the huge advances in space exploration and all things in digital technology. Of all spacecraft, love the Voyagers the most.

your presentation skills are impeccable, always a pleasure to watch!

Amazing, simply incredible. I never realized voyager would be updated like this.

This is one of the most interesting videos I have seen in a while. I always wanted to know about the updates that are sent to the Voyagers. I would like to send the Voyager to Proxima Centauri and its planets. It will be great to know about the chances of Human survival , if possible on one of the planets. Thanks again for these amazing and informative videos.♥

voyager always stuns me with the fact that it is still sending signal, I have great respect to its team. If there will be an voyager 3 and would love to send it solar system exploration as the old voyagers with more advanced hardwares, and be designed to travell faster and even further, and even have a dedicated interstellar mission to perform science to learn more about it.

I’d love to hear about how the thrusters can still be fuelled after so many years. Do the thrusters simply use very little each time they’re activated?

Fortran is becoming rarer but is still not uncommon, though I imagine the Fortran 77 used in the Voyager spacecraft is pretty esoteric and has some fairly big differences when compared to modern Fortran. However, to say assembler is from the 40's and 50's is silly, as it's still a core staple skill for low-level software engineering. Understanding and writing assembly routines is still a common requirement for sections of highly optimized code, low-level debugging on general purpose platforms, and sometimes a basic requirement for aspects of embedded development. However, the key element in this conversation is that there is no one assembler as it's symbolic machine code. Every architecture has its own very unique dialect of assembler, meaning that AMD64 (x86-64), AARCH64 (ARM64), MC68k, etc., are all very different, as dictated by the instruction set architecture (and there are significant differences within generations of common families of ISA's - for example, the copy-pasta'd example of code deletions at 2:26 are 16bit x86 assembler, easily identifiable as such due to the register names not being prefixed with E (32bit i386) or R (AMD64) extensions). I imagine that the mentioned job posting was looking for someone who had enough experience to learn the (what I imagine to be) pretty unique instruction sets of the Voyager's archaic computers, with a knack for careful optimizations. One final note: the CCS and AACS (both derived from the same system architecture) used core memory, while the FDS was the very first (IIRC) computer in spaceflight to use CMOS IC based memory and is of an entirely different architecture from the other two.

Amazing video and I can’t believe I won the giveaway thank you for the amazing work you put into the videos!! And I would send the voyager 3 to outer layers of Milky Way galaxy

Amazing! Thanks for sharing this! 16 bits per second, we’ve come a long way. Just sending another voyager on the same mission with new hardware would be amazing.

This is truly epic. By the way... I love the way you worked in the NordVPN commercial.

Honestly it's amazing how human engineering and advancements in technology allows us to interact with a box of metal which is 15billion km away. If it were up to me I would want to send voyager to the center of our galaxy , though it's a long trip, I'm sure we will find lots of interesting stuff about interstellar dust and more , anyways great video as always. Keep uploading 🎉

I remember programming in Fortran and assembly (IBM BAL). Those were the days that programming was an art and required massive management of resources.

What surprises me the most is how codes & updates are transferred billions of kilometres away from Earth WIRELESSLY 😮. This is truly fascinating.

I'm impressed with the Ad break , kudos ahahah

5:15 I think by "pseudocode" you meant "subroutine". Pseudocode refers to "code" that is not intended to be run by a computer (and is often non-compliant to any language), but intended to only be read by humans, most often used to explain algorithms.

I would send Voyager 3 to Neptune, since the last spacecraft we sent to visit that planet was Voyager 2, which still has been the only probe to visit that planet.

Thanks for another astonishing video! There are no bland or boring videos on Primal Space.🌞

Kudos to the Content creater to give such an excellent segway for the sponsor.

It is truly phenomenal how it still operates after so many years. I hope it continues functioning even longer