Uplifting News @lemmy.world alphacyberranger @sh.itjust.works 1y ago

Voyager 1 returning science data again

spacenews.com 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.

Spaceflight @sh.itjust.works llamacoffee @lemmy.world 1y ago

spacenews.com /voyager-1-returning-science-data-again/

NASA @lemmy.world threelonmusketeers @sh.itjust.works 1y ago

Voyager 1 returning science data again

spacenews.com /voyager-1-returning-science-data-again/

32 comments

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.
Incredible that we can still receive the signal after all this time over such a vast distance. I wish we made our current devices with such longevity in mind 😉😄
- Voyager is the Nokia of space probes: practically obsolete, code written in ancient runes almost nobody can still decipher and read... yet still keeps on ticking.
- How the actual fuck is a signal being sent 24 billion kilometres? That's nuts
  
  I just don't get how it doesn't get destroyed by random space shit. I get space is infinitely empty but it's also infinitely full too, right...
  
  Get a big enough dish and you can do wild shit. Arecibo observatory was able to use radar to map the surface of Venus to like 1km resolution.
  
  Apparently it's on a 12 foot antenna. That's crazy. I thought for sure they'd be communicating on a much larger dish.
  
  I'd wager the data rate is pretty low, to increase the fidelity.
Headline implicates that it was returning non-science data so far lol
- It was sending memory images of its RAM. So that's not wrong.
- since November 2023, when a computer malfunction on board the spacecraft caused it to return garbled data.
- Cat images
V'Ger
This makes me genuinely happy. Not much uplifting news actually uplifts me these days. This is one of the rare headlines that does.
I thought i thought this was solved weeks ago?
- They figured out how to resolve it weeks ago.
  
  It has taken this long to implement the results, and to get usable data flowing again
  
  They're basically rewriting the software, and if it goes horribly wrong, the probe will just stop talking forever. So no one was in a big rush to push this into production.
I'm sure it wasn't aliens :: x files music ::
- That's what I thought too, until I read
  
  The announcement that Voyager 1’s instruments were returning data again came two days after JPL announced the passing of Ed Stone, who served as Voyager’s project scientist from the mission’s inception in 1972 until 2022.
  
  And realized it was the ghost of Ed Stone.
  
  That makes more sense. He just flipped the bit while he was on his way.

32 comments