News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

A comment on NASA to keep its 48-year-old Voyager 2 probe running for yet another year. Parent comment

Re:NASA to keep its 48-year-old Voyager 2 probe running for ... by mawadev on Saturday August 08, 2026 @02:41AM (#49219404)
I think its the tech stack, the stuff runs on assembly, bit of fortran and likely C. You simply cannot match that level of reliability these days, because people started to forget how to do that... Look at cars and everything else...
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:NASA to keep its 48-year-old Voyager 2 probe running for ... by PunchyHamster on Saturday August 08, 2026 @02:50AM (#49219442)
But cars do have that level of reliability, in ECU (sans hardware I guess, still flash memory). It's just everything else around is ass
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:NASA to keep its 48-year-old Voyager 2 probe running for ... by ButlerianJihad on Saturday August 08, 2026 @08:30AM (#49221213)
Usage of higher-level languages is in the labs and on the ground-station side of these missions. No FORTRAN interpreter runs on a space probe.

In the 1970s, there was a distinction between "machine language" and assembly language. Assembly (or assembler) language is the symbolic source code that a programmer would use. Machine language is the binary dump of the actual text segments that the CPU directly interprets to run.

[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:NASA to keep its 48-year-old Voyager 2 probe running for ... by iberator on Saturday August 08, 2026 @12:13PM (#49223155)
Voyager runs on assembly. only 10 instructions. Very simple and real RISC processor
[ Parent | on HN ]