NASA still maintains some of the Voyager spacecraft code from the 70s era

I highly recommend watching "Its Quieter in the Twilight" (https://www.dailymotion.com/video/x9rrxr) a cool documentary about the engineers still running voyager (a lot of them have been on it for decades)

It's mind boggling that they didn't digitize every last scrap of paper around the project years ago, for starters.

Why does the picture at the top of the article look more like Cassini–Huygens than Voyager?

Regarding "that almost nobody on Earth fully understands anymore", I claim this is nonsense, and definitely not an obstacle.

I've audited codebases in languages that I haven't programmed in. It is a matter of grasping a few basic concepts, like branch execution, branch destination, where data is stored, how it is communicated. Don Lancaster told us how to do this: https://www.tinaja.com/ebooks/enhance_vI.pdf.

How else will we be able to assist the crew of the Enterprise?

As the should. Voyagers are still active and this maintenance is needed in case issues occur. In a way due to the +24 hours oneway communication to correct software issues should they occur, this will help speed corrections up.

Now I wonder how the test it ? Is it on a software emulator on modern equipment or do they have a Voyager replica ?

So it's 60 years old codebase still running. And in the two human-made objects the further away from earth.

Maybe only a few COBOL codebases still active can beat that? Or not?

> younger engineers often have the capability but not the inclination

Kids these days... Why would someone in their right mind think working on the Voyager project could damage their careers? You can work on new and fancy tools all you want to improve supporting tools, and it's still one of the coolest space missions active. Plus, it has a real end - at some point, support will be further reduced and the person will move on to another space exploration job, with the extra golden star of having been on the Voyager.

Many of the issues could potentially be solved by modern LLMs?

Reading, analyzing and assembling documentation could be probably done by LLMs.

And by including old code and snippets into the training set, the LLM could be fairly proficient in writing this code probably too?

Maybe someone knows more about the use/not-use of LLMs in this context?

> The succession problem matters most in the next decade. After that, the question becomes academic. There will be no Voyagers left to maintain.

Well, the Voyagers will still be there, there will be just no way to contact them anymore once the power runs out or communication is lost (whichever happens first)...