After crisis in interstellar space, stream of Voyager 1 data resumes. Before its computer crashed, the venerable NASA probe may have entered mysterious new region beyond the Solar System.
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 」
The venerable Voyager 1 spacecraft is experiencing another glitch. Instead of sending science and engg. data, it is sending a 0101 bit pattern.
The problem has been narrowed down to the flight data system (FDS), which is not communicating properly with the telecom unit (TMU). A reboot did not help.
Stay tuned as NASA engrs work out a fix for this 1970's era computer, which has performed magnificently during its long 46-year journey to the planets and to outer space. https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/
1/n
Here is some info on the various instruments on the two Voyager spacecraft and their current status.
Note that several instruments have been permanently turned off either because of failures or to save power (power level from the RTGs has dropped over 50% since start-of-mission, over 46 years ago).