1 Voyager 2

In July 2023, a command was sent to Voyager 2 - a space probe travelling more than 2 billion miles away from the Earth 1.

That command caused the probe’s antenna to recalibrate to a different angle, and that in turn led to loss of contact.

A month later, another command sent from the Eart caused the probe’s antenna to recalibrate, which restored the communications channel.

It turns out NASA keeps in touch with its spacecraft using a form of a command-line interface (CLI).

If you are familiar with any Linux shell (Bash, Zsh, etc.), you are already a step closer to understanding, and even operating, space probes.

Devices with Linux on board run on Mars 2.

Over such a long distance, the round-trip time (RTT) is around 20 minutes.

Luckily, as someone commented 3:

Huge delays between keypresses is what Vi (and Vim, of course) was designed for.

  1. https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-66408851↩︎

  2. https://www.reddit.com/r/linux/comments/lpyqcb/linux_is_running_on_the_surface_of_mars_in_the/↩︎

  3. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39078669↩︎