Last Voyager Engineer Retires

Nichelle Nichols poses with Zotarelli when presenting the engineer with a certificate of honor (2007, 30 years of launching Voyager)

Imagine that you are working on a computer that is 40 years old and your superiors (and you work in the office) do not even know what is with this machine do. And this is not a fantasy, but the real situation that has developed with the Voyager project at NASA. The device was built in 1975 and on board he has a computer from the Atari era. The last person who fully understands what to do and how to work with it is NASA's 80-year-old engineer Larry Zottarelli.

And now he is retiring .

Voyager 1located at a distance of about 20 billion kilometers from Earth. In 2013, this spacecraft became the first man-made object to leave the solar system. The main mission of Voyager is to study Jupiter and Saturn, and it ended many years ago. Instead, the spacecraft studies the outer regions of space, while someone controls the system.

True, at a distance of 20 billion kilometers, it is almost impossible to update the on-board computer system, and you have to put up with what is. According to Susie Dodd, the current head of the Voyager project, this kind of computer should be in the museum.

Zotarelli has been working in the project since the launch of Voyager - since September 5, 1977. It manages the data systems of the device, the volume of which is as much as 64 KB. To work with the device you need to use a long outdated programming language.

In order to determine whether Voyager 1 left the solar system or not, scientists decided to listen to an audio recording lasting 45 seconds recorded by the device (“space music” in outer space differs from how the “solar system” sounds). True, Voyager 1 only records audio twice a year, and this could be a problem. Dodd asked Zotarelli to solve the problem, and he did.

Suzy Dodd was only 16 years old when Voyager was launched. Since then, a lot of instructions have disappeared, manuals - have sunk into oblivion. Now the project team often has questions about how and what works. People who work in a project often do not know how something works, and finding documentation for a 38-year-old system is simply impossible. Previously, all the documents were in order, but the Voyager team changed their office more than once or twice, and something was lost during the move.

Unfortunately, the project engineers did not always document their actions, and now many old team members are no longer there. With them, knowledge and information that was impossible to return were gone.

For example, a few years ago, the current Voyager team realized that the flight software of the device was supposed to be disconnected in 2010. Dodd called all the old project workers who could be. But no one remembered why the system was programmed in this way. The team managed to circumvent restrictions and prevent the device from stopping.

Now the last representative of the old team is leaving, and the task of the leadership is to find one that can replace him. To do this is not just difficult, but very difficult. The minimum that can be done is to find a young engineer, and ask Zotarelli to work with the newcomer for about a year. But how to find a young engineer who knows the programming languages ​​of 30 years ago? This is an almost impossible task.