Serendipity35

"Hack" sometimes has a bad reputation. But there are some good hacks.In technology and computing, it has two meanings:
1. Unauthorized Access (verb): To gain illegal or unauthorized access to data, a computer system, or a network (e.g., "My account got hacked").
2. Clever Code Solution (noun/verb): An elegant, clever, or quick fix in programming that solves a tricky problem.

We turn to space. NASA's Voyager 1 is still moving through interstellar space at over 35,000 miles per hour (56,000 kilometers per hour). It is 15 billion miles (about 24 billion km) away from Earth.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab wants it to keep going for just a bit longer.

There are two Voyagers, both launched in the late summer of 1977. They are wonderful relics. These older electronics give off waste heat - which is usually a bad thing - but it keeps practically every instrument onboard warm.

It will run out of power. That was expected to happen quite a while ago, but it keeps on going. So now, JPL is doing a critical power-saving hack on sister probe, Voyager 2. They’re toggling on and off Voyager 2’s key components across a coordinated sequence. It conserves energy but still keeps things from freezing.

Why Voyager 2? It was closer to Earth and had more power to test this hack. It worked and now they want to the hack on the farther-out Voyager 1.

What is their power supply? They both have modest nuclear power plants. These thermoelectric generators convert heat produced by the natural radioactive decay of plutonium-238 into electricity. That plutonium isotope is decaying toward its 88-year half-life, so less heat is being emitted.

The probes launched with 10 instruments apiece. Some have been powered down because they served their purpose when they were moving through the planets in our solar system.

I hope Voyager 1 makes it to November and hits a historic milestone. It passes one light-day’s distance from Earth. That is a fraction of one light-year, but it is also 173 times the distance between Earth and the Sun.

If it passes that point and stays online, it will take messages over 24 hours to reach it. Its 50th anniversary will be on September 5, 2027.

I wrote last week about plans to harvest solar power from space for places like data centers. If it sounds like science fiction, that might be because it was first imagined in a 1941 short story, "Reason," by Isaac Asimov. (see below)

It was formally proposed by engineer Peter Glasser in 1968, a space pioneer who introduced the idea of using satellites to beam solar energy from space down to Earth. Over the decades, what Glaser envisioned has been known by many names — space-based solar power (SBSP), solar-power satellites or satellite power system (SPS), as well as satellite solar-power system (SSPS). Glaser's contributions to space science and technology were not limited to the solar-power satellite concept. He also worked on NASA's Apollo moon missions and headed an experiment that flew aboard the space shuttle Columbia in 1986.

But solar power from space beamed to Earth has remained mostly theoretical due to cost and complexity.

Data centers need power. A lot of power. People don't want data centers in their neighborhoods. Where will it come from? From space?

Meta announced a deal with startup Overview Energy to purchase solar power collected by satellite and beamed back to Earth.

It is an experimental approach that could power data centers at night. Unlike traditional solar power, which relies on storing daylight, space-based solar power aims to deliver continuous energy.

Overview Energy plans to deploy satellites over 22,000 miles from Earth's equator, where they would collect and transmit infrared energy to solar panels. A test is scheduled for 2028, with a commercial rollout in 2030. Meta is seeking up to 1 gigawatt of power from the project, underscoring its energy needs for AI.

It sounds a bit wishful thinking if you look at the numbers. In 2024, Meta's data centers consumed 18,000 times the electricity that this deal would deliver in a single hour. 

Space-based solar power (SBSP) involves harvesting solar energy in orbit and beaming it to Earth, providing 24/7 clean energy unaffected by weather, nighttime, or atmospheric filtering. There are challanges: high launch costs, complex orbital assembly of massive structures, and wireless energy transfer. 

You may have heard the advice to speakers to open with a joke, so here we go.
A bunch of scientists created a huge machine capable of complex calculations and called it UNIVAC. Eager to test their invention, they asked it, “Is there a God?”The vacuum tubes hummed, and the tape spools spun for several minutes. Finally, the machine spat out a little card, on which was written, “THERE IS NOW.”

That's an old joke, but it seems fresh in this "Intelligence Age" of artificial intelligence and fears of a singularity. In this time of AI and having a computer in the palm of our hand, it is interesting to consider what was happening in tech history back in 1951. That was when the Remington Rand Corporation signed a contract to deliver the first UNIVAC computer to the U.S. Census Bureau.

UNIVAC I (which stands for Universal Automatic Computer) took up 350 square feet of floor space — about the size of a one-car garage — and was the first American commercial computer. It was designed for the rapid and relatively simple arithmetic calculation of numbers needed by businesses, rather than the complex calculations required by the sciences. It was intended to compete against IBM’s punch card-reading computers, but UNIVAC read magnetic tapes, not punch cards, so a special “card to tape converter” had to be designed.

Though the government contract was signed and a ceremony held on March 31, the computer wasn’t actually delivered until the following December. There was only one UNIVAC I, and Remington Rand wanted to use it for demonstration purposes. They asked for and received time to build a second computer.

The government was the first big customer of the UNIVACs, with subsequent models going to the Air Force, the Army Map Service, the Atomic Energy Commission, and the Navy.

The computer first came to the notice of the general public in 1952, when CBS used one to predict the outcome of the presidential election. UNIVAC correctly picked Eisenhower and predicted his electoral count within 1 percent, but the network didn’t release the results until after the election was called, so as not to affect the outcome.

The first commercial sale was to General Electric, for their Appliance Division, followed soon after by the Metropolitan Life Insurance Company, in 1954.

There were 46 UNIVAC I’s built and delivered, in all.