More than 46 years after launch, more than 15 billion miles from home, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is restored, rebooted, and once again sending data back to Earth.
The contract #Boeing got for a new spaceship was fixed-price, and worth much more than SpaceX got for the same job. Boeing has for decades gotten fat off of cost-plus contracts, meaning they could bloat the project until shareholders were fat & happy & DOD just kept paying them.
One fixed-price contract & they turn into helpless marshmallows.
Another ~13m drive, -2m in elevation change for #Perseverance, along the easternmost path I mentioned yesterday. Maybe those ripples aren't that difficult to cross after all.
Those shortcuts I thought I found through the regolith ripples look pretty impassable from this angle; but maybe they'll look better as the rover comes closer to them.
Quickly processed, leveled, cropped MCZ_RIGHT mosaic, FL: 63mm
looking WNW (284°) from RMC 52.2750
Sol 1156, LMST: 12:44:54
New location for #Perseverance on Sol 1156, after a rather short ~16m drive downhill, which brought the rover 2m lower, to RMC 52.2750. There is now a ~10m remaining vertical distance to be covered to the bottom of the riverbank and onto the ancient riverbed of Neretva Vallis.
On Wednesday, May 22, 2024, at 7 pm (PDT), Dr. Robert Pappalardo (NASA Jet Propulsion Lab) will give a free, illustrated, non-technical lecture entitled: “Europa Clipper: Exploring Jupiter’s Ocean World"
May has been an exciting month for our Sun. A barrage of solar storms and coronal mass ejections created the strongest solar storm to reach Earth in two decades — and possibly one of the strongest displays of auroras in the past 500 years. NASA.gov tells us how the agency tracked it, and the images and videos are astonishing, too. https://flip.it/VBUyCn #Science#Space#SolarStorms#Aurora#NASA
#Perseverance moved just 6 clicks on Sol 1154, apparently repositioning itself at the same location, so, no new map, just a newsbite from Mars
(courtesy of Little Assistant™)
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
Confirmation today from the Voyager 1 team that the transmission received on Sunday contained science data from 2 of the 4 operating instruments - the plasma wave subsystem and the magnetometer. The other 2 instruments - the cosmic ray subsystem and the low energy charged particle instrument - require recalibration, which will be done in the coming weeks.
The delicate software operation is working as expected.