Voyager 1 returning science data again
Voyager 1 returning science data again
The four instruments on NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft are returning science data for the first time since a computer malfunction last November.
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Respect to the computer scientist who sorted that out. That has got to be an extremely satisfying bug to fix.
As a software engineer, I'm still trying to figure out their build pipeline. That thing has got to be interesting.
No documentation, imagine! The original designers--dead. This person had to reverse engineer every aspect of that system, though I can't imagine that it has more than, say, 64KB of RAM. Still an enormous amount of work but not like trying to figure out how an iPhone works without any documentation.
According to the above, the software was written in FORTRAN.
There's probably at least one warehouse somewhere full of green bar sprocketed teletype / dot matrix paper with the source code on it, if not also magnetic tapes. And that assumes they haven't archived it in other places and formats in the last ~50 years.
70kB though. That's a huge amount of memory for 1977. Low-end personal computers were still selling with less than that 10 years later.
That said, the article doesn't distinguish ROM and RAM, so I wonder how much of that is ROM. ROM is and was far cheaper.
Also, that 70 might be a rounding up of 65536 bytes, which is 64k, so you might be spot on with your guess there.
Ive never heard of ROM, what is it?
Read only memory
Ha my sister had to learn FORTRAN for her research science work. Lot of long-term, old survey tools use it still. Apparently it was... not a pleasant experience to learn the language haha.
Yeah, I had a Sinclair spectrum with 48k ram. Later on I had a BBC B computer that iirc had 32k. It was actually a pretty powerful machine, you could do a lot with it.
I will just correct you here incase someone thinks its ok not to write good documentation:
But each time there is a problem, ground teams have come up with a trick to keep the Voyagers going, often referencing binders of fraying blueprints and engineering documents from the spacecraft's design and construction nearly 50 years ago.
This snippet is from here: https://arstechnica.com/space/2024/03/finally-engineers-have-a-clue-that-could-help-them-save-voyager-1/
I recall the original software devs wrote an extensive documentation that has saved NASA numerous times.
(Have to admit I am still striving for proper documentation writing)
It was probably the flight operations team honestly. They have a ton of contingency procedures for stuff like this.