Hacker Cinema
It's Quieter in the Twilight
2022 · Film · documentary · 83 min
Directed by Billy Miossi
In an unremarkable office space, a select group of aging engineers find themselves at the leading edge of discovery. Fighting outdated technology and time, Voyager’s flight-team pursues humankind’s greatest exploration.
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26 comments on Hacker News
Ah, good, an opportunity to recommend It's Quieter in the Twilight (2022). Beautiful documentary.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
Watch the documentary "It's Quieter in the Twilight" to find out how the people currently responsible for Voyager 1 & 2 managed through a multi-month deep-space-network maintenance outage during the pandemic. (I was able to watch it on Amazon Prime Video).
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
Watch the documentary "It's Quieter in the Twilight" to find out how the people responsible for Voyager 1 & 2 feel about it.
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
I can really recommend the documentary It's Quieter in the Twilight. It covers the flight-team operating Voyager, and shows in-depth what they and Voyager is doing.
If anybody wants further context, here's an excellent paper on the status of the Voyager mission as of 2016, written by one of the engineers at JPL. It has an overview of what all the instruments on Voyager do and everything the team had done to keep the mission going as of that point. https://csclub.uwaterloo.ca/~pbarfuss/VIMChallenges.pdf I also highly recommend the documentary "It's Quieter in the Twilight" which is about the entire Voyager team and their efforts to keep the program operational.
This YouTube video is just a trailer for the documentary, it does look amazing. It looks like the entire documentary is available on some free streaming sites, here's one: https://play.xumo.com/free-movies/it-s-quieter-in-the-twilight/XM03NY2HJB8KSF
If that doesn't work, try using a VPN set to the US as country.
I loved watching "It's quieter in the twilight", a documentary about how a dedicated team of engineers (mostly retired) are fighting to keep the Voyager mission alive.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
It's Quieter in the Twilight[1] is a 2022 film about associated engineers.
[1] Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vJT8AW0wYw , Free with ads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIP1p5gAoak
Obligatory trailer for the "It's Quieter in the Twilight" documentary, about the team of engineers riding out the end of the Voyager program:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vJT8AW0wYw
I highly recommend "It's Quieter in the Twilight" (2022), a documentary about the team maintaining these spacecraft as the end of their mission draws nearer. It adds a tremendous amount of context to articles like this.
The engineering involved in making these spacecraft durable for as long as they have been is truly awe inspiring. As a software engineer it seems silly to consider where my code will be in fifty years. I wish it wasn't.
I have not see the posted video, but this documentary, It's Quieter in the Twilight, was great. The Farthest was also excellent.
https://www.pbs.org/the-farthest/
Obligatory link: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
Worth a watch, imo:
It's Quieter in the Twilight
https://www.space.com/nasa-voyager-mission-engineers-documentary
Interesting trying to manage their declining power budget. And decipher docs written 40+ years ago.
For a very engaging documentary about the remaining team of Voyager 1 scientists, watch "It's Quieter in the Twilight". The ending kind of tails off, mostly due to the Covid pandemic, but it's a great look into how a group of aging scientists and engineers (the last to really understand how Voyager 1 works) are keeping it alive.
There's a good documentary about the quirky team of NASA engineers that keep in contact with the Voyager probes...
It's slightly melancholic, the engineers are aging, the mission's heyday is long past... but there's something gripping about it...
"It's Quieter in the Twilight" (2022)
https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
There's a documentary "It's Quieter in the Twilight" about the team keeping the Voyager missions alive: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vJT8AW0wYw
I loved watching "It's quieter in the twilight", a documentary about how a dedicated team of engineers are fighting to keep the Voyager mission alive.
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
I thought I'd noticed this documentary on HN a few weeks ago, but I'll re-add it here.
"It's Quieter in the Twilight": https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
Interesting piece on a bit of the history of the Voyagers, as well as recent interviews with the handful of remaining folks dealing with Voyager today (well, as of 2021/2022).
Watched the documentary "It's quieter in the twilight" (2022, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/) the other day, loved the passion the current group working on Voyager have for them.
The film "It's quieter in the twilight" might be of interest to folks on this thread. I saw it on Amazon Prime, but I think it is available on quite a few platforms, according to https://www.itsquieterfilm.com/where-to-watch
Check out It's Quieter In The Twilight movie.
My understanding is that its very well documented, but the funding isn't there to do much with it. I mean most of the team behind things like the Atari computers, Acorn, Commodore, early Apples, etc are retired but we can emulate them and understand these things on a very technical level. I know this isn't a great analogy, but ultimately age of the project or the age of the original team members isn't the bottleneck.
I sometimes see retro projects on hack-a-day done by people who could be the grandchildren of the original designers of those vintage chips and OS's. They probably know more about that chip or OS than the original people do just due to them being out of the game for so long. The same way people regularly lose to fifth graders in tests because they dont recall 5th grade science and civics. If anything your scenario might be the opposite! Grandpa might be asking his granddaughter how those registers worked or how to emulate his OS from 1982.
I remember reading about the team that maintains the Voyagers. Its a skeleton crew using legacy equipment to keep the communication going with the assumption the next decade, or even earlier, is going to be it.
NASA has the same problem the private sector has. Capitalism rewards things that will generate profit/prestige, not legacy cost centers, and NASA is not immune from that dynamic as NASA employees and managers want to maximize their income and prestige too. So the people maintaining or bug fixing old products are often lowest on the prestige, pay, recruiting, and profit spectrum than those chasing new things. They get the skeleton crew funding and can't do novel things, even if technically possible because of lack of staff and buy-in.
Passion projects make for feel-good documentaries like 'It's Quieter in the Twilight' but ultimately if society isn't vested in these teams, their hands will always be tied.
For those interested in learning more about the challenges in keeping the probes alive, the 2022 documentary It's Quieter in the Twilight follows the small, incredibly dedicated team working the project. Free to stream on Prime.
The simple fact that many of the original engineers are no longer alive presents significant challenges in and of itself.
There's a nice recent documentary about the team that keeps these spacecraft working and developing software updates, "It's Quieter in the Twilight" (2022):
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/
Can recommend the documentary It's Quieter in the Twilight https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/ that follows the engineers working with voyager 1 and 2
It's not immediatley on point, but the title reminds me that many here may enjoy the documentary about the Voyager team as it works today called It's Quieter in the Twilight.