Voyager 2 is programmed to reset its orientation multiple times each year to keep its antenna pointing at Earth. The next reset is due on 15 October, which Nasa says “should enable communication to resume”.
I find it stressful enough doing an update on a remote server (where there’s someone in support who can reboot the box if it all goes wrong). It’s got to be something else to send commands to a spacecraft that’s now light hours away. It’s not just that you can’t exactly go out and troubleshoot the hardware, it’s also that the ping time is rather extreme so you won’t know for hours if you’ve screwed up or not!
You have to appreciate the resilience of the design, though, it says the probe has an automatic reset every few months so it will hopefully recover in October when the next reset occurs
Who hasn’t pushed bad code to production?
Imagine executing the command, immediately realising you fucked up and having to wait 36 hours for the response back from the probe
I’ve never pushed bad code to production. None of my unit tests fail*.
* I don’t ever write unit tests
If the probe is finally dead i.e. we can no longer communicate with it, I feel like it would be a fittingly ignoble end.
