this post was submitted on 22 Apr 2024
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Voyager 1 contact restored

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[–] [email protected] 35 points 6 months ago (17 children)

I was hoping they would say in this article what they did to fix it!

[–] [email protected] 104 points 6 months ago (14 children)

The actual news release has a bit more information.

The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.

So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.

Source: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth

[–] [email protected] 14 points 6 months ago (4 children)

Wait how did they do all that WITHOUT contact?

[–] [email protected] 1 points 6 months ago

This Satelite must offer option to install software updates over the air, so they modified software and slowly uploaded it to the satelite.

[–] [email protected] 5 points 6 months ago

It's simple rocket science

[–] [email protected] 34 points 6 months ago (1 children)

The problem was that Voyager sent junk data back to us due to a memory fault. It was still responsive to receive updates from Earth and to pings.

Pinging Voyager 1 takes about 2 days, so testing updates is naturally quite slow.

[–] [email protected] 20 points 6 months ago

Not only round trip time, the hardware only supports bandwidth of 160bps at this range. Down from the 21.6kbps at launch.

[–] [email protected] 15 points 6 months ago* (last edited 6 months ago)

Im guessing it could still listen just not talk back

Edit read the article

Although the radio signal from the spacecraft had never ceased its connection to ground control operators on Earth during the computer problem, that signal had not carried any usable data since

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