In her last gasps of digital life, but the sturdy spacecraft refuses to die.
https://www.livescience.com/space/s...am-of-gibberish-from-outside-our-solar-system

 

The reports of my death have been greatly exaggerated.

https://www.cnn.com/2024/04/22/world/voyager-1-communication-issue-cause-fix-scn/index.html
Voyager 1 is sending data back to Earth for the first time in 5 months

The mission team received the first coherent data about the health and status of Voyager 1’s engineering systems on April 20. While the team is still reviewing the information, everything they’ve seen so far suggests Voyager 1 is healthy and operating properly.

“Today was a great day for Voyager 1,” said Linda Spilker, Voyager project scientist at JPL, in a statement Saturday. “We’re back in communication with the spacecraft. And we look forward to getting science data back.”

The breakthrough came as the result of a clever bit of trial and error and the unraveling of a mystery that led the team to a single chip.

https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth
NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

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.

The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.

 

You have to give a massive amount of credit to the ingenuity and foresight of the engineers who designed Voyager. Lasting 10 times longer than their expected lifetimes and being able to address issues remotely is unprecedented.

I was working at HP Labs when they were launched and we were monitoring their progress.

 

And a big shout also needs to go out to the small handful of people that are still running the mission. Being able to diagnose problems and devise safe fixes on a platform that is so far away and for which you have to play detective to deduce the condition of the various systems as they degrade is truly remarkable.

 

Thats why they call them rocket scientists.

Kudos

 

Here is an interesting article on the computer hardware on the Voyagers 1 and 2.

https://www.eejournal.com/article/voyagers-1-and-2-take-embedded-computers-into-interstellar-space/

 

Here is the YouTube video mentioned at the end of the above article of the presentation made by Aaron Cummings.

 

Kudos indeed. Just as well Voyager isn't running Windoze and needing frequent updates!
.

 

Voyager was made in the 70s. Most of the engineers are dead. (all?)
To the grate men and women that made Voyager, rest knowing you did well.

 

Voyager was made in the 70s. Most of the engineers are dead. (all?)
To the grate men and women that made Voyager, rest knowing you did well.

I think there's still a couple of folks from the original mission team that are still on the team. Talk about a life's work!

 

Less than 1 FIT. Impressive....

 

The NASA scientists and engineers behind the Voyager missions, watch "It's Quieter in the Twilight", 1 hour 25 mins.

Watch It's Quieter in the Twilight (2022) - Free Movies | Tubi (tubitv.com)

 

Kudos indeed. Just as well Voyager isn't running Windoze and needing frequent updates!
.

Yes, and that's not a joke either it's a cold hard and ridiculous fact.

I worked with a lot of stuff like that back then and I can tell you there was not one single mode that we could not analyze to the smidgen of a smidgen to trace every possibility of what it might do, because the entire system was completely deterministic. Today's systems like Windows, nobody really knows all the avenues that might be taken and what times they might be taken and when a corridor might be a dead end which means a reboot is the only possibility. I think it has gotten better over the years, but progress has been slow.

 

NASA fixed a thruster problem and Voyager 1 is now able to point towards Earth again, after 6 years.

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/v...ger-1-team-accomplishes-tricky-thruster-swap/


This article says that it hadn't been able to point at Earth for 6 years.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...erstellar-space/ar-AA1qpG9J?ocid=BingNewsSerp

NASA could use some big thinkers now for things like compatible spacesuits from SpaceX and Boeing. You'd think someone would have remembered the problem they had with the Apollo CO2 scrubbers...

 

https://phys.org/news/2024-09-voyager-team-tricky-thruster-swap.html

Engineers working on NASA's Voyager 1 probe have successfully mitigated an issue with the spacecraft's thrusters, which keep the distant explorer pointed at Earth so that it can receive commands, send engineering data, and provide the unique science data it is gathering.
...

 

NASA fixed a thruster problem and Voyager 1 is now able to point towards Earth again, after 6 years.

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/v...ger-1-team-accomplishes-tricky-thruster-swap/


This article says that it hadn't been able to point at Earth for 6 years.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/tech...erstellar-space/ar-AA1qpG9J?ocid=BingNewsSerp

NASA could use some big thinkers now for things like compatible spacesuits from SpaceX and Boeing. You'd think someone would have remembered the problem they had with the Apollo CO2 scrubbers...

I guess the CO2 is a problem, but it's mainly because those dang astronauts want to keep breathing in and out and in and out, geeze, if they would just stop that

I guess everyone here heard by now the ISS crew won't be coming back home too soon, something like February of next year, yikes. I wonder if they are getting nervous. Imagine being stuck up there floating around with no sure way to get back. Takes guts to go up there in the first place I guess knowing it's one of the more dangerous adventures anyone could go on. I wonder how much food they have up there.

 

Just think of the hazard pay and overtime.

 

I guess the CO2 is a problem, but it's mainly because those dang astronauts want to keep breathing in and out and in and out, geeze, if they would just stop that

I guess everyone here heard by now the ISS crew won't be coming back home too soon, something like February of next year, yikes. I wonder if they are getting nervous. Imagine being stuck up there floating around with no sure way to get back. Takes guts to go up there in the first place I guess knowing it's one of the more dangerous adventures anyone could go on. I wonder how much food they have up there.

Most astronauts are envious of them because most missions are pretty short and they know they are only going to get a small number of flights, perhaps just one and often not even that. Astronauts want to be in space, so getting stuck up there for eight months is like a dream come true for most of them. Plus, they aren't really stuck, in terms of having no way to get down in the event of an emergency. There are presently, as of yesterday, six spacecraft docked at the ISS.

 

Most astronauts are envious of them because most missions are pretty short and they know they are only going to get a small number of flights, perhaps just one and often not even that. Astronauts want to be in space, so getting stuck up there for eight months is like a dream come true for most of them. Plus, they aren't really stuck, in terms of having no way to get down in the event of an emergency. There are presently, as of yesterday, six spacecraft docked at the ISS.

If SpaceX can fly Billionaires for spacewalks they could easily get those astronauts home faster than next year. I agree with you, they are loving it at the ISS but will get pretty bored if NASA can't find some real work for them to pass the time.

 

If SpaceX can fly Billionaires for spacewalks they could easily get those astronauts home faster than next year. I agree with you, they are loving it at the ISS but will get pretty bored if NASA can't find some real work for them to pass the time.

If they absolutely had to, they probably could, but I imagine that all of the available vehicles between now and then are already booked, since any space mission still takes months, or even years, of planning. Since they probably can't build an extra one much sooner, they would have to not only pay for an extra mission in it's entirety (instead of just tweaking planned missions to accommodate the changes needed), but would have to bump one or more flights to later dates, which will not only incur a lot of anger, but may also incur penalties for contract breeches that would have to be covered.

As for the boredom, they won't be twiddling their thumbs. There is always a backlog of maintenance items that can be performed, plus many of the science experiments collect far less data that they would really like because of lack of available crew time. So there's also quite a few happy campers with experiments on board because they might get quite a bit more data out of their flight than they figured they would have to settle for.