NASA Finds Cause of Voyager 2 Glitch 283
astroengine writes "Earlier this month, engineers suspended Voyager 2's science measurements because of an unexpected problem in its communications stream. A glitch in the flight data system, which formats information for radioing to Earth, was believed to be the problem. Now NASA has found the cause of the issue: it was a single memory bit that had erroneously flipped from a 0 to a 1. The cause of the error is yet to be understood, but NASA plans to reset Voyager's memory tomorrow, clearing the error."
Sometimes, if you do things right... (Score:5, Funny)
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That is one of my favorite quotes from Futurama!
Re:Sometimes, if you do things right... (Score:5, Funny)
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Yes, if you make it look like an electrical thing.
Really? (Score:3, Insightful)
Let me guess: cosmic ray. Is it really that hard? What else causes a single bit-flip error in space?
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Just incredible! (Score:3, Insightful)
Voyager is anything but brand new. Voyager is probably older than most Slashdotters, having been launched in 1977. Think about it: 1977 - when advanced microchips were not as powerful as the chip driving the shatty calculator you buy today at the dollar store. 1977 was a different time, when information technology usually didn't even involve transistors, yet, and vacuum tube testers (for your TV) were still found at the local drug store.
And yet, some 33 years later, Voyager 2 is still chugging on, after vis
Re:Just incredible! (Score:5, Informative)
1977 was a different time, when information technology usually didn't even involve transistors, yet, and vacuum tube testers (for your TV) were still found at the local drug store.
Tube testers were pretty darned hard to find almost anywhere in 1977 (you could find them in old-used-electronics stores). I do recall testing tubes in drugstores in the early 70's.
Solid state, and even (*gasp*) integrated circuits were in widespread use. Why, by gosh by golly, we even had *8080*'s then.
I was a senior in college in physics+EE; I and a handful of my fellow students managed to coerce one of the EE profs to take a few hours and teach us about tubes (they had been removed from the curriculum). For the most part the interest was for us audio-nerds... tubes had that nice desirable sweet sound... (but I digress)
Re:Just incredible! (Score:5, Insightful)
tubes had that nice desirable sweet distortion...
There, fixed that for ya...
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Analogue amplification gives even harmonics whereas digital amplification gives odd harmonics. And even harmonics are more pleasing to the ear. You can obviate the problem of odd harmonics by producing more harmonics to nudge the signal back to more pleasing shapes, but that means that an op-amp running at 192kHz can produce a pseudo-analogue amplified signal equating to an analogue amplifier with a ceiling of 30kHz.
It's one reason why early CDs were, frankly, crap: the sound engineers used the same techniques making the sound track for the CD that they did for the analogue LP. But the CD has different strengths and weaknesses and some processes that utilised the strength of LP and avoided the weakness of them were unsuited to the CD characteristics.
AFAIR, the re-release of the White Album was the first one where they went back to the original tapes and worked the signal to accord with the CD and digital amplification strengths.
Now they're ditching the high dynamic range of CD in the loudness war.
Way to go, guys.
All I hear is: "Blah blah blah tube blah blah loud blah blah" *ringing in my ears*
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Writing was well past on the wall for tubes by 1977. TV's were almost all solid state by the mid 70's, with the exception of the GE "portacolor" sets, which somehow managed to be made into the 80's. (No idea how / why they kept them that way. I suppose GE had a massive glut of associated parts).
Radios and stereos would have been SS for a decade already, for the most part (couple stragglers here too).
The latest production, normal, sort of consumer type tubes, (ie. not 100kW radio station tubes) made here tha
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I wonder what a brand new ancient rad-hard cpu costs.
They're all kind of "ancient", by some definition. The BAE RAD6000 is at least 14 years old and they go for about 1/4 mil. Most recent launch was this February.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/IBM_RAD6000 [wikipedia.org]
Some might consider the RAD750 to be "ancient" being about 9 years old. They retail about $200K. The TSSM is going to launch in a decade with one, at which point that CPU will be 19 years old.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/RAD750 [wikipedia.org]
The cost and licensing of the fault tolerant GPL LEON series is very confusing, s
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I live in Canada and
Well obviously Canada was still using an outdated technology years after everyone else had stopped using it ;)
New-fangled memory (Score:5, Informative)
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In the 1970s, computers were used for two things: to go to the moon, and to play pong. Nothing in between. That was back before every OS sucked [deadtroll.com].
Just thought you would appreciate the song. Getting offa your lawn now.
Re:Just incredible! (Score:5, Informative)
1977 - when advanced microchips were not as powerful as the chip driving the shatty calculator you buy today at the dollar store.
Classic, ever repeated confusion of what "power" is. Unless you mean volts times amps, power is what you can do with it. An old mainframe can run a department of a small multinational corporation, maybe a large university, or perhaps a division of state government. We know this, because they did in fact do so, very profitably. You claim a dollar store calculator is more powerful. That means a dollar store calculator should be able to run, say, an entire multinational corporation, maybe multiple universities, or an entire state government. Oh wait, a dollar store calculator can, at best, slowly calculate someone's income tax, possibly correctly. I guess the old mainframe is more powerful after all.
When I worked at a mainframe shop in the late 90s I heard alot of similar tiresome comments... "Ha ha, mainframes, bet you didn't know my laptop can run NOPs faster than your mainframe can run floating point FFTs ha ha ha mainframes". At which point you simply tell them to put up or shut up, hand them a bus and tag cable, and have their infinitely "more powerful" laptop process 5% of the NYSE volume like our mainframes did, while supporting about 100K trader desks, a couple TB of tape robot storage, etc.
Re:Just incredible! (Score:5, Interesting)
>>>have their infinitely "more powerful" laptop process 5% of the NYSE volume like our mainframes did, while supporting about 100K trader desks, a couple TB of tape robot storage, etc.
A laptop could do that if it had an efficient assembly-written OS (like Kolibri), rather than the bloated general purpose OSes like Windows NT or OS X. At my former company we used the equivalent of laptops (Pentium 2s) to manage, load mission data, and launch a ship full of Tomahawk missiles.
Re:Just incredible! (Score:4, Funny)
Classic, ever repeated confusion of what "power" is. Unless you mean volts times amps, power is what you can do with it.
Have you ever kissed a girl?
Re:Just incredible! (Score:5, Funny)
Have you ever kissed a girl?
This is the wrong place to ask for dating advice.
Re:Just incredible! (Score:4, Informative)
Exactly. The IBM 360 had a truly incredible I/O capacity, powered by multiple parallel processing elements called "channels." You programmed them with "channel command words" or CCWs. They were independent of the main CPU. When a channel needed memory, it got locked down (pfixed) and allocated to the channel, so the channel could piss into memory at high speed. Really large, thick cables connected the CPU with peripheral devices. These cables had lots of wires in them. Because lots of bits were flowing IN PARALLEL. Look up the transfer rate of a 2701 drum drive, still maintained and used for paging devices as late as the 1980's by companies who could not find anything faster.
When DEC tried to claim that they could replace 360's with VAX's, guess what happened? They didn't have massively parallel I/O processors. They didn't have a massive transfer capability. They generated an interrupt on every character typed by every user, for God's sake. They were not I/O engines. They failed, utterly. Not that VAX wasn't a good machine, but no way could it replace a 360.
How did a small 360 support hundreds of users? Why, through an innovation called "CICS." What happened was, the mainframe would fill a 3270 CRT terminal screen with a "form." You would fill in the form, locally, using the "smart" 3270's field-editing and checking capability, with no interaction with the mainframe. When you were finished filling in your form, you'd hit TRANSMIT. At which point, the variable data on your form would be glued together by the 3270 in one record and sent up for processing by the mainframe (along with everyone else's form data). A few seconds later, you'd get another form in response. Lather, rinse, repeat.
Oh wait. That's exactly how most business Web applications work. Except the screens are prettier.
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I can't help but think that they purposely set the limits low so that when the machines operate better than anticipated, NASA (or anyone else for that matter) can take a higher degree of credit than if they were more realistic with the expectations.
That's one way to look at it.
Another way to look at it is that it is impossible in most cases to precisely predict how long a specific instance of a part will last before failure, and you can at best describe it probabilistically. So first, you're going to desig
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Let me guess: cosmic ray. Is it really that hard? What else causes a single bit-flip error in space?
When you have a probe billions of miles from Earth, with no hope of ever physically retrieving it, and something weird happens, I don't think the first thing you do is start making assumptions.
Re:Really? (Score:4, Insightful)
It's pretty amazing that they even were able to track the problem down to a particular bit. No general purpose operating system has anything even remotely having dreams of approaching that level of reliability and stability. It's nice to see the strengths of bare-metal hacking demonstrated in this bleary age of big-button-pushing Java and .NET.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Insightful)
Its also extremely important to note that not a single item you own is made to the specifications that Voyagers were made, even though made over 30 years ago.
Its also rather important to note that as unstable as most OSes are, they are several million times more complex than the code Voyager 1 and 2 run.
Finally, joke about Windows all you want ... if you do a default installation of Windows and you don't install any additional drivers or software, it is extremely stable and will just sit there for ages happy to do nothing but tick away.
Its also entirely feasable to find 1 stuck or flipped bit even using Java and .NET, you just have to actually understand the inner workings of this code which is not something pretty much any developer working in these environments has time to do these days.
Both things may be computers that run code and use electricity to do so, but thats about where the shared bits end. These guys have been using the same code for 30+ years ... they kinda know how it works and all its quirks at this point.
With all that said ... you're still right, its freaky impressive.
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Impressive how they established this one bit with certainty - a command for transmitting back, basically, RAM content? Or at least checksums for various parts of it, narrowing down the location? (what about the storage from which it will be restored?) Would that even work considering the gibberish transmitted?
If that was determined based largely on a copy at hand - what if some other bit is also wrong?...
Re:Really? (Score:4, Interesting)
Certainty? I don't think so.
I think they simulated Voyager with this bit flipped and saw the same output (that is transmitted to earth).
I hope they tried to flip ALL bits, and found that only this one bit would give the results seen. If you would follow the code and find and test just a few likely places, I'd expect a few more unexpected places to give the same results.
The quick fix is to send the correct byte to the craft and hope that fixes it. If the bit has become stuck in the new position, they will have to do a remote firmware upgrade (with the code rewritten to fit the stuck-at value...) Other memory cells may have broken down in the mean time, but with a stuck-at value that is correct for the current version of the firmware, which you won't know until you try them....
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I assume they did in fact try a _lot_ of combinations. Testing all of them is probably impossible due to the complexity of even the "basic" system they sent flying in 1977, but I assume they went though this stuff _carefully_.
What I find more amazing than locating the actual problem is that they can reset the thing over all that distance and be reasonably certain that it will come back to life.
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Finally, joke about Windows all you want ... if you do a default installation of Windows and you don't install any additional drivers or software, it is extremely stable and will just sit there for ages happy to do nothing but tick away.
Let me just OT for a moment here: if you didn't install any drivers or software... it'd just sit there, period, and you wouldn't be too happy about this slightly warm expensive paperweight you just bought. What on earth is the point of a computer without additional software?
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The comparison is against Voyager that also have software installed, but where Windows is so much more complex and still with potential to run that stable. But yes, of course that complexity also drives the hw requirements.
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I would not trust a Windows system to run until 2040 without a critical problem which requires hands-on maintenance.
I doubt that this is the first time they've had to perform diagnostics or maintenance on Voyager.
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The main argument that I feel does work in this case is mean time between power cycles. A Windows box really starts to struggle after a couple of months.
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Yeah, the problems only come when you try to use the keyboard or mouse.
Re:Really? (Score:5, Informative)
It's pretty amazing that they even were able to track the problem down to a particular bit.
To be fair, Voyager doesn't have many bits in its memory :). Tracking down a bad bit is much easier when you have 4k of RAM than when you have 4GB of RAM.
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Tracking down bits is probably always easier is you have intimate knowledge of a system.
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Re:Really? (Score:4, Funny)
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It's happened before. Last time they just rearranged the code so that the particular bit that had become stuck-at-0 was required to be 0. Might have been a mars mission and not voyager.
Bah Kids today (Score:3, Insightful)
You probably haven't had much experience with these older computer systems. They did what they need to do and that is it. The hardware was wired to do what it needs to do. Every bit had a purpose If that bit failed you knew that something was wrong. Making it fairly easy to find the bit that was bad.
1K can be represented in a 32x32 square. these systems had only a few k of memory to view. And millions of dollars for funding Finding a missing bit is actually very easy. Especially if you go threw the d
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I can hope, can't I?
Re:Really? (Score:4, Funny)
Let me guess: cosmic ray. Is it really that hard? What else causes a single bit-flip error in space?
Incredibly annoying alien hackers?
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Let me guess: cosmic ray. Is it really that hard? What else causes a single bit-flip error in space?
Incredibly annoying alien hackers?
That's what I heard, and through a very reliable source [theonion.com]
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Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
V'Ger is unwilling to just transfer the data to its Creator...
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Actually it was a metric "0" that got switched to an imperial "1".
Re:Really? (Score:5, Funny)
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Let me guess: cosmic ray. Is it really that hard? What else causes a single bit-flip error in space?
Pick one. Any one.
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You're the second one to suggest "age". When humans die of age, that's some failure in the human body that's common when people grow old. That's when we say someone died of old age. However when human made devices die, there is always a component that has failed. When you have a 5 year old mobile telephone that dies, you say it died of old age, and replace it. That's because you don't care and replacing it costs less than finding out the root cause for the failure.
When a properly designed computer flips a b
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In any case, I don't know what memory technology voyager uses. The (slightly) more modern space shuttles used magnetic core memory for essential systems. These are not affected by cosmic rays. If it isn't magnetic core, then it is likely to be static RAM. This too is not easily modified by a cosmic ray.
I got curious and looked it up: http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/faq.html [nasa.gov]
...apparently it uses Plated Wire memory [wikipedia.org] which I had not heard of before, but seems to be a relative of core store.
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You're the second one to suggest "age". When humans die of age, that's some failure in the human body that's common when people grow old. That's when we say someone died of old age. However when human made devices die, there is always a component that has failed. When you have a 5 year old mobile telephone that dies, you say it died of old age, and replace it. That's because you don't care and replacing it costs less than finding out the root cause for the failure.
When a properly designed computer flips a bit, SOMETHING happened. We may never know, it might have been a cosmic ray. But don't you think that they would use space-certified RAM chips for such a project?
Semiconductor devices deteriorate over time due to dopant diffusion in the substrate. It's entirely possible for that memory bit to flip because the threshold voltages have drifted too far out of specification over the years.
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>But don't you think that they would use space-certified RAM chips for such a project?
They did, but cosmic rays come in a wide range of intensities, from feeble all the way up to having enough energy in one photon to make (baseball analogy ahead) a baseball jump.
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>> The cause of the error is yet to be understood
Just to clarify: this was the submitters comment: it does not appear in the source article.
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Hardware that old uses sufficiently large components such that the mundane cosmic rays that regularly strike earth and earth-orbiting satellites are generally not strong enough to flip a bit. While it's certainly possible that one got a lucky shot, it's also quite possible that the hardware is failing, or that Voyager 2 is encountering much more energetic cosmic rays at the edge of the protective range of the Sun's magnetic field. Assuming the reset works, it'll be interesting to see how it fares as it fl
Core Memory (Score:2)
It was my understanding that Voyager's computers used CORE memory since it is not susceptible to radiation induced soft errors.
So.... reboot? (Score:5, Funny)
Why don't they just always try that first?
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Because if it had been something else, rebooting could have done more harm than good.
Re:So.... reboot? (Score:5, Insightful)
Because sometimes it doesn't come back on again.
Brett
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Re:So.... reboot? (Score:4, Funny)
Re:So.... reboot? (Score:4, Funny)
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I despair!
33 years and still going strong - nuclear FTW (Score:5, Insightful)
This is why you DO WANT nuclear energy in space! OK, Voyager 1 and 2 have RTGs, but even those are considered politically incorrect these days, especially such massive ones as in the Voyagers.
More nuclear power in spacecraft, I say. To provide propulsion (ion drive, or even better, explosive drive) and energy when far from the Sun. Fuck PC.
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Politically incorrectness is not what is stopping RTGs from being launched, but lack of supply of plutonium 238 [discovery.com]. It's difficult to protest launches with radioactive elements because they all have been successful. And if one were to crash, the RTGs are sealed so there would not be any leakage. Unfortunately environmentalists want to protest anything radioactive, even though such criticisms may no longer be valid.
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Nuclear reactors have been used in space before, the soviets used them in some radar satellites [wikipedia.org]. The shielding isn't really a problem once it's in space so a reactor could be designed with just enough shielding to contain the initial radioactivity of the fuel without worrying about shielding the much higher radiation levels once the reactor is operating. The shielding that it does have could also be jettisoned fairly early on in the mission.
I will agree however that RTGs are much more reliable and as such a
Re:33 years and still going strong - nuclear FTW (Score:5, Informative)
Something is so very, very wrong with your reasoning. If NASA couldn't fix the problem we wouldn't just have a bit of space junk spewing out garbage transmissions, we'd have a bit NUCLEAR space junk spewing out garbage transmissions.
Oh no! What a terrible thing! There's nothing like that in space at the moment, how could we possibly manage?
The Van Allen belts contain high enough concentrations of radiation that they make Chernobyl's fallout look like spilt milk. The sun regularly pumps out solar flares that would kill unshielded humans in seconds. Compared to that, I find it very very difficult to be at all concerned by a tiny spacecraft literally billions of kilometres away.
That is a very bad idea for two reasons (assuming you're referring to project Orion and not completely off your tree). 1. Nuclear bombs are very heavy and very destructive, not only do you have the cost of getting them up there but you also have the very real possibility of them being detonated at slightly the wrong angle or slightly the wrong distance vaporising the craft (we are talking about NUCLEAR fucking bombs people) or any of the myriad of other unpredicted problems you will encounter in deep space. 2. Once out in space, you do not need continual propulsion, deploying an explosive drive means sending up two propulsion systems rather then just putting more fuel into the first.
Oh dear, where do I start? Firstly, no, nuclear explosives (they're only bombs if you're dropping them on someone) are not necessarily "very heavy". They can be easily built small and light enough to fit into an artillery shell; if a serious Orion development programme was resumed, you'd be looking at 5-10 kg per charge, possibly less. In the Orion model, the pusher plate and damping structure are by far the most massive components. Secondly, nuclear explosions behave very differently in a vacuum than in air; most of the destructive power of a nuclear detonation on Earth is due to the way that the massive energy release affects the atmosphere. Thirdly, it's bloody hard to get a nuclear explosive to detonate. They can only detonate successfully if a very long and complex chain of events occur in precisely the right way. I think you overestimate the risk massively. Honestly, mining with conventional explosives is far more risky than propulsion using nuclear explosives will ever be. Finally, one of the biggest advantages of the proposed Orion propulsion system is that the mass efficiency is very high, meaning that it's possible to continue thrusting for a long period of time, so the whole point is that you want to use it "out in space."
I recommend reading 'Project Orion' by George Dyson [amazon.co.uk] if you want to know more about the practicalities of the Orion propulsion system.
Two massive hurdles prevent the use of nuclear reactors in space, weight and the ability to operate them safely from remote. First, nuclear reactors are very very heavy with all that radiation shielding.
Which you don't need in space; you design the reactor so the majority of the radiation produced is directed away from the spacecraft. Look up NASA's SP-100 design.
Secondly we can not guarantee that remote systems will operate, it's hard enough to keep a well maintained reactor on the ground operating without constant human intervention (which is why they have constant human intervention) let alone one that will be completely unmaintained and far far from any human help.
No, modern reactors run on almost completely automated systems, even down to choosing which rods should optimally be replaced next. Human intervention is only required when modifying output to match grid loads (and even then, that's largely automated too). Even if something goes wrong, modern reactor safety systems have so much redundancy and fail-safe assumptions
Hero (Score:5, Insightful)
NASA is my hero. They do cool shit all the time. Even when their stuff breaks, it's cool. Then they fix it and it's even more cool.
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They do cool shit all the time.
No kidding [youtube.com]
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that's probably why real scientists are surprised that is such a thing as a "software bug" --- they don't really expect you to say a program works unless it actually works.
Well, we could say the program works in theory, and then, when it doesn't, say it's all right, the theory was just disproven.
Or, we could say we don't know if works, but it's a good enough aproximation for what you need. And then we can put someone to investigate whether it really was.
Cosmic Ruse (Score:2, Interesting)
First I was going to suggest that this satellite would careen forward out of control like a Toyota, but then realized that wouldn't be quite accurate.
The cosmic rays we get one Earth are actually short-lived particles such as muons (a fat electron, probably most well known aside from the standard protons-neutrons-electrons) that result from cosmic naked hydrogens hitting our atmosphere. Out in space though, it'd be interesting to see if those protons would have the same effect as a terrestrial "cosmic ray"
Unbelievable (Score:3, Funny)
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http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Error_detection_and_correction#Error-correcting_code [wikipedia.org]
Apparently V1 and V2 got the beta version of ECC.
Just don't brick it! (Score:3, Informative)
I wonder how many bits they'll have to send to change the one wrong one, and how long that will take.
Leave it to the stoner astrophysicists Carl Sagan to oversee one of the more amazing feats of space trave!!
Radioisotope thermoelectric generator [wikipedia.org]s are awesome!
Anyone know how much fuel is remaining? They've been heating up for knowledge for a long period of time.
Personally, I want about 6 of the units in Voyager 2, screw solar!
What, no ECC? (Score:2)
I'm surprised that a single-bit error is even an issue on such an important (and expensive) piece of equipment.
Hamming codes [wikipedia.org] have been around since the 1940's.
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The spacecraft is in an incredibly hostile environment. Who's to say that there *wasn't* ECC and it's just that it's Hamming code wasn't enough to compensate for the error - it would make sense: as the hardware ages, the device leaves the solar system, the errors start getting closer and closer to the limits of error correction until one day - bam, even with error correction it slips through the net and ends up as a bad bit in memory.
Technically, this is possible (but incredibly rare) on even the greatest
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Time Delay (Score:2)
NASA plans to reset Voyager's memory tomorrow
Considering the distances involved, I found it funny that the sentence implied simultaneity. Voyager 2 is about 92 AU out (according to WP), which is 12 light-hours and 45 light-minutes. So if they send the signal in the morning, the memory will be reset in the afternoon, and they can hope for clean signals the day after.
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Would you consider it less funny if they'd said "NASA plans to reset Voyager's memory tomorrow and they'll know the next day if it worked"?
butterflies in space ... (Score:2, Informative)
So who misused the emacs macro?
For those of you who don't get the (obligatory) xkcd reference:
http://xkcd.com/378/ [xkcd.com]
Oh geee is it. sounds like bullshit ... (Score:2)
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Cosmic ray examples (Score:3, Interesting)
While not naming specifically cosmic rays as the cause in this case, what examples of actual cosmic ray-induced debacles are there in software eng. history?
Reset the memory? (Score:4, Funny)
Well, okay, as long as they don't get the "Press any key to continue" message...
Re:Reset the memory? (Score:4, Funny)
NASA technician #1: Voyager 2 is sending a text string to inform us of its status.
(Looks at screen.)
NASA technician #2: Did the reboot work? What does it say?
NASA technician #1: "Keyboard not found. Press F1 to continue."
So they are taking the helpdesk's advice? (Score:2)
They are going to reboot it and it will solve the problem. Heck, just like Windows. If all the users I had to support would reboot their machine before calling half of them wouldn't need to call.
Of course, they refuse to learn that...
soft error (Score:2)
> a single memory bit that had erroneously flipped from a 0 to a 1.
Didn't this used to be known as a soft error, as in cosmic rays passing through the chip and flipping a bit.
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All that and no "Try SCE to aux"?
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the voyager probes use a radioisotope thermoelectric generator so that wouldn't work anyway
Plus you wouldn't want it to work that way - planetary encounters are mighty interesting. They were the main reason for existence of Voyagers in the first place...
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That and the Sun being fainter than a full moon on Earth when seen from that distance make solar panels rather impractical.
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In Voyager-like mission, sure. But in some cases which were until recently a no-go, it's "...made solar panels rather impractical", not strictly "make". At least for missions to Jupiter; they will use solar panels soon (and I wouldn't be too surprised if the progress in solar panels gave us that at Saturn at least, at some point)
Re:Cosmci Ra (Score:5, Funny)
What else would it be?
According to some German, aliens [thefirstpost.co.uk].
W
PS is "Cosmci Ra" related to Mumm-Ra? Or She-Ra for that matter?
Re:What!? No parity checking?! (Score:4, Funny)
Nah, thats just like rebooting a Windows 2003 server. 14 days and it's still "Applying Computer Settings"