Two degrees of separation

[ChrisGreaves]

The subject of this topic probably caused you all to think of Six degrees of separation; it did me.

Canberra Deep Space Communication Complex on lookout for NASA's lost Voyager 2 spacecraft. My eye was trapped by "The mistake from NASA operators only shifted the spacecraft's antenna by 2 degrees, but that was enough for it to lose contact with the Earth-based tracking station 19 billion kilometres away.", but of course, at 19,000,000,000 Km, a miss is as good as some 1.6 Km.

To put this ("It's always interesting when you have a spacecraft which is coming up to its 46th anniversary in a space mission only designed to last 12 years.") into perspective I had to riffle through my memory banks and map it to my life. What was I doing at age twelve? Getting ready to start High School! And by age forty-six I had spent two and a half years working in the Île de France and half a year teaching in Singapore and ...

The icing on the cake was "the spacecraft will automatically reset in October which should do the trick." which suggests that the mission's programmers have catered for more future glitches than ever I have done in writing a computer program.

Well done that team!
Cheers, Chris

[BobH]

Here's me, 46 years ago.

At 34.JPG

Aah. Callow youth. I shall spare you today's view.

[John Gray]

As usual, The Register documents this occurrence with its customary wit...

[ChrisGreaves]

As usual, The Register documents this occurrence with its customary wit...

... and speed: " at a tedious 160 bits per second".
That's about the same order of magnitude as a teletype, no? 10cps?
Cheers, Chris