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
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
Oh! What a discovery: “It’s Quieter in the Twilight” — a film about the people who keep Voyagers 1 and 2 going! I’m watching it on Tubi but it’s available via other sources.
“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 Fighting outdated technology and time, Voyager's flight-team pursues humankind’s greatest exploration.”
Die Kreativität der Verantwortlichen in der #Raumfahrt finde ich immer wieder beeindruckend. Was die aus den Geräten herausholen, an die sie nicht herankommen und die teilweise Jahrzehnte alt sind:
#Voyager-Sonden: Weniger präzise Ausrichtung auf Erde soll Lebenszeit verlängern
Voyager 1 und 2 haben ihre geplante Missionsdauer um das Zehnfache überschritten. Um das Ende weiter aufzuschieben, wurde eine weitere Änderung vorgenommen.
🛰️ La sonde #Voyager1 de la NASA a un souci sur 1 de 3 ordinateurs de bord qui ne communique plus avec le sous-système de communication. Aucune donnée scientifique ou technique n'est renvoyée sur Terre.
Investigations difficiles en cours lorsque le signal met 22,5 heures entre la Terre et la sonde
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.
"... nearly a half-century [currently 46 years] later... [#Voyager1 & 2] have become the longest-lived and farthest-flung probes ever dispatched by humankind...
: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 」
"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..."
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.
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
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.