Very cool: “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.” Read the article for details, but the gist is that they were able to troubleshoot a bum chip, then work around it. From what I can tell from the article, ’twas very cleverly done. The programming seems extra-cool somehow when you’re dealing with a significant light speed delay…
Via Facebook.
The Flight Data Subsystem has 8k of RAM (0.0000076 GB). 256 bytes of it went bad. Voyager 1 used CMOS RAM instead of core memory, and this FDS RAM lasted for 50 years. Now one tiny part went bad.
They managed to figure that out, and push a fix, 12 light hours away, on the 50 year old hardware, with no means of sending anyone to fix it if anything went wrong.
And fixing it meant rewriting the whole thing to stop using those 256 bytes. I imagine it might be only possible because so many sensors are permanently disabled.
Well done all around.
This is like solving a Zebra Puzzle in which the clues are written on the back of a particularly difficult 3000-piece jigsaw.
Well done, indeed!