I mean the Voyager 1 probe which is currently the human-made object the farthest away from earth. The space program people operating the mission seem to have great control options, they even “moved software from one chip to another” (link) Apart from the probably gigantic and expensive installation needed to receive and/or send messages from/to that far away from home (23 hours of delay?), are there any safety measures to prevent a potentially malicous actor from sending commands to the probe?

  • EleventhHour@lemmy.worldEnglish
    341·
    3 days ago

    Yeah, obscurity. The code sent back-and-forth is proprietary to NASA in the 70s. I’d be shocked if anyone else has any idea how it interpret it other than NASA themselves. it’s not impossible, of course, but it doesn’t use any common protocols or software that anyone outside of NASA would be familiar with. Whatever data got intercepted would likely come out as gibberish.

    To get anything useful out of the data, they would have to have a replica of NASA’s Voyager ground computer. And its software package. The plans for those are not exactly on the Internet.

    • SanguinePar@lemmy.world
      161·
      3 days ago

      it doesn’t use any common protocols or software that anyone outside of NASA would be familiar with.

      Suddenly Lemmy hates Voyager because it’s not FOSS…