The last engineer from the Voyager team retires

Nichelle Nichols poses with Zotarelli when presenting an honorary certificate to an engineer (2007, 30 years of Voyager launch)

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

And now he is retiring .

Voyager 1 is located at a distance of about 20 billion kilometers from Earth. In 2013, this device became the first man-made object to leave the solar system. The main mission of Voyager is to explore Jupiter and Saturn, and it ended many years ago. Instead, the spacecraft studies the outer regions of space, and someone controls the system.
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True, at a distance of 20 billion kilometers to update the on-board computer system is almost impossible, and you have to put up with what is. According to Suzy 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 - from September 5, 1977. It manages the data systems of the apparatus, the amount of which is as much as 64 KB. To work with the device, you need to use a long-obsolete programming language.

In order to determine whether Voyager 1 left the Solar System or not, the scientists decided to listen to an audio recording with a duration of 45 seconds recorded by the device (the “cosmic music” of 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, many instructions have disappeared, manuals have sunk into oblivion. Now the project team often have questions about how and what works. People who work in a project often don’t know how something functions, and it’s impossible to find documentation for a 38-year-old system. Previously, all the documents were in order, but the Voyager team changed the office more than once or twice, and in the process of moving something was necessarily lost.

Project engineers, unfortunately, have not always documented their actions, and now many of the old team members are gone. With them went and knowledge, information, which is impossible to return.

For example, several years ago, the current Voyager team realized that the flight software of the device was supposed to shut down in 2010. Dodd convened all the old project workers, who can. But no one remembered why the system was programmed that way. The team managed to bypass the limitations and prevent the apparatus from stopping.

Now the last representative of the old team is leaving, and the task of the management is to find something 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 a newcomer for about a year. But how to find a young engineer who knows programming languages ​​30 years ago? This is an almost impossible task.