Finally, engineers have a clue that could help them save Voyager 1
Finally, engineers have a clue that could help them save Voyager 1
A new signal from humanity's most distant spacecraft could be the key to restoring it.
an engineer with the agency’s Deep Space Network, which operates the radio antennas that communicate with both Voyagers and other spacecraft traveling to the Moon and beyond, was able to decode the new signal and found that it contains a readout of the entire FDS memory
What's really cool is they wanted to inspect the FDS to see if any parts of it is corrupted, and it was sending a whole damned readout back to us the entire time. No one could figure that out until now though.
oh, to be part of the core team of engineers for this - decoding ancient schematics and code, your entire focus on keeping this project alive. absolutely legendary stuff.
I've got an Apple II+ that was doing weird shit. Turns out after a lot of sleuthing that it was a single bad DRAM chip, which due to the way that system handles RAM would show up as single unpredictable bits in various locations.
NASA, seek me out if y'all get stuck.
It said that they're comparing the memory from this signal to the memory banks when it was in a known-good state and that it would take (possibly) months. And I wondered why they couldn't diff it. But as I'm typing, they probably need to account for measurements and data collected in between as opposed to just resetting something to the previous state.
Flip those bits, NASA. I'm hopeful.
Sending a Raspberry Pie to them?