Voyager 1 is likely dead

jcyclonee

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One of you nerds has to be able to explain to me how this can start working again. Was it passing through some kind of radiation field? Did it get closer to some kind of light source? Did Voyager run into a female Voyager and decide it wanted some privacy?
 

mred

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One of you nerds has to be able to explain to me how this can start working again. Was it passing through some kind of radiation field? Did it get closer to some kind of light source? Did Voyager run into a female Voyager and decide it wanted some privacy?

Basically, a memory chip failed, and they had to tell Voyager to painstakingly move the code on that chip to a different memory location.


By March, the team had figured out that a memory chip that stored some of the flight data system’s software code had failed, turning the craft’s outgoing communications into gibberish.

A long-distance repair wasn’t possible. There wasn’t enough space anywhere in the system to shift the code in its entirety. So after manually reviewing the code line by line, engineers broke it up and tucked the pieces into the available slots of memory.

They sent a command to Voyager on Thursday. In the early morning hours Saturday, the team gathered around a conference table at JPL: laptops open, coffee and boxes of doughnuts in reach.

At 6:41 a.m., data from the craft showed up on their screens. The fix had worked.
 

jcyclonee

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KidSilverhair

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Basically, a memory chip failed, and they had to tell Voyager to painstakingly move the code on that chip to a different memory location.


So these guys can remotely fix a computer issue 15 billion miles away but if I have an issue with my internet it’s either “too bad, live with it” or “we’ll send a guy out in three weeks”? Yeah, right … it was space wizards who did it.
 

Cyrocks

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One of you nerds has to be able to explain to me how this can start working again. Was it passing through some kind of radiation field? Did it get closer to some kind of light source? Did Voyager run into a female Voyager and decide it wanted some privacy?
It reminds of the Star Trek Episode The Changeling.
 
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Kinch

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Cool interview with the Voyager director.
Takeaways:
The space ship was built in 1972 and launched in 1977, but the faulty chip was a 1964 model (made by Texas Instruments).
The test bed that the Voyager had used for previous troubleshoots broke years ago. The Voyager computer system outlived the test one built.
Voyager's gas propellents to change its attitude to point the craft towards earth, has enough propellent for years and will probably the last thing working once the space ship power shuts down.
The faulty chip allows less than 300 words of code.

 

cydnote

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Cool interview with the Voyager director.
Takeaways:
The space ship was built in 1972 and launched in 1977, but the faulty chip was a 1964 model (made by Texas Instruments).
The test bed that the Voyager had used for previous troubleshoots broke years ago. The Voyager computer system outlived the test one built.
Voyager's gas propellents to change its attitude to point the craft towards earth, has enough propellent for years and will probably the last thing working once the space ship power shuts down.
The faulty chip allows less than 300 words of code.

More sophisticated than we thought
 

Kinch

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Other things I have learned. Engineers used Saran wrap in wrapping some of the components when it was built. The chips are bigger on Voyager than what they use now and that probably has led to its longevity. Also, while there were a couple of engineers who worked with Voyager for years it was a young man just out of colllege who figured out much of the solution. He learned the same coding in college that was used by NASA 50 years ago and had it fresher in his mind. The engineers taped up and drew flow charts, sticky notes and code on a wall, very similar to how engineers had to solve Apollo 13’s problems. The engineers said that’s what they liked the most.
 
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Kinch

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Interesting story about how the computers on the Voyager work. Most interesting thing was the only diagram on something particular of the computer is not online, but only on paper format and there is only one available, but not at the time he was writing this paper. The author said the designers nailed the computer for the voyagers.
 

Kinch

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The voyager story gets more amazing.
 

qwerty

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Interesting story about how the computers on the Voyager work. Most interesting thing was the only diagram on something particular of the computer is not online, but only on paper format and there is only one available, but not at the time he was writing this paper. The author said the designers nailed the computer for the voyagers.
Like Voyager is precursor to current space tech, Here is the precursor to the Space Shuttle.

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