Engineering for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is a highly coveted position that’s virtually equivalent to scoring the job of the lifetime, so it’s no wonder that the agency exhibits one of the lowest turnover rates of all federal jobs. When people retire they often take years of specialized knowledge with them that few outsiders possess. Now, with engineer Larry Zottarelli’s upcoming retirement, NASA’s seeks more than the usual MIT graduate to fill his shoes, but an expert in 60-year-old programming languages.
We’re talking about FORTRAN, COBOL, and assembly languages of the late 1950s, back when development of the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft initially commenced.
The two spacecraft eventually launched one month apart in the summer of 1977, and to this day, they continue to float somewhere in the vast abyss, occasionally in need of some remote maintenance.
“It was state of the art in 1975, but that's basically 40 years old if you want to think of it that way,” said Suzanne Dodd, program manager for the Voyager program, “although, some people can program an assembly language and understand the intricacy of the spacecraft, most younger people can't or really don't want to.”
Half a century later, FORTRAN continues to be used in numerical weather prediction, computational fluid dynamics, and computational chemistry, but it, like COBOL, has fallen out fashion, ranking at positions 22 and 21 in the TIOBE index (the popularity of programming languages index). Combine the likelihood of knowing FORTRAN, COBOL, and assembly language, and we’re looking at a very specialized position to fill.
The power supplies onboard the Voyager twins contain enough energy reserves to remain operational for just about another decade, but anything beyond that is unknown. Zottarelli’s successor will be tasked figuring out a way to prolong this timeframe by performing an “energy audit” from 12 billion miles away, reprogramming the onboard equipment to initiate a sleep mode when not in use.
But that’s not even the tricky; what may prove difficult is resolving the issue out within the confines of 64 kilobytes of memory and be able to transmit the code by radio waves, a process which takes 17 hours and requires relay from the Canberra antenna of NASA’s Deep Space Network. New sequences are typically transmitted every three months.
Bear in mind that the current software running on the two craft was overhauled in 1990, introducing looping protocols that permit a certain degree of automation, saving precious battery life.
“The flight software was basically completely re-written in order to have a spacecraft that could be nearly autonomous and continue sending back data to us even if we lost communication with it,” Dodd said. “It has a looping routine of activities that it does automatically on board and then we augment that with sequences that we send up every three months.”
Age discrimination aside, NASA doesn’t expect to hire any young candidates with the proper working knowledge to fulfill the job, instead, it hopes to internally nab someone in their 50s, which, nevertheless, is a huge step up from the current on-the-brink-of-retiring 70s.
If the effort proves futile, the agency hopes to pick the brains of the remaining staff before turning to the original project documents.
Source: Popular Mechanics and Geek.com
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