This upbeat story is about human persistence and tenacity more than it is about technology — but the technology is pretty amazing too. And it's from 1977. That's more than 46 years ago.
My thoughts and prayers go out to #voyager1, which after journeying for half a century to reach interstellar space is still expected to answer fucking work emails
Clear communication has been restored with #Voyager1. The probe is over 15 billion miles away, sailing in interstellar space. That it's still operational after 47 years is amazing, and the kind of results we'll never get with for-profit space companies.
Voyager 1 written in memory unsafe assembly language and FORTRAN, without use of Rust or Category Theory, or reflection, or dependent data types even, seems to still be working. #software#memorysafe#voyager1
For the first time in five months, NASA engineers have received decipherable data from Voyager 1 after crafting a creative solution to fix a communication problem aboard humanity’s most distant spacecraft in the cosmos.
"Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.
So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure... they all still function as a whole..."
:thinkerguns: NASA knows what knocked Voyager 1 offline, but it will take a while to fix | @arstechnica
「 The faulty memory bank is located in Voyager 1's Flight Data System (FDS), one of three computers on the spacecraft. The FDS operates alongside a command-and-control central computer and another device overseeing attitude control and pointing 」
"... nearly a half-century [currently 46 years] later... [#Voyager1 & 2] have become the longest-lived and farthest-flung probes ever dispatched by humankind...
Good news for the 47-year-old and 22.5-light-hour-away #Voyager1: #NASA sent a “poke” instruction and managed to get back a dump from the Flight Data System. Now they’re diffing it against a dump received before the #spacecraft’s Telemetry Modulation Unit started spewing a stuck pattern to Earth three months ago.