NASA Figured Out Why Its Voyager 1 Probe Has Been Glitching for Months (gizmodo.com) 58
NASA engineers have traced the Voyager 1 spacecraft's transmitted gibberish to corrupted memory hardware in its flight data system (FDS). "The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn't working," NASA wrote in an update. Gizmodo reports: FDS collects data from Voyager's science instruments, as well as engineering data about the health of the spacecraft, and combines them into a single package that's transmitted to Earth through one of the probe's subsystems, the telemetry modulation unit (TMU), in binary code. FDS and TMU have been having trouble communicating with one another. As a result, TMU has been sending data to mission control in a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes. NASA's engineers aren't quite sure what corrupted the FDS memory hardware; they think that either the chip was hit by an energetic particle from space or that it's just worn out after operating for 46 years. [...] The engineers are hoping to resolve the issue by finding a way for FDS to operate normally without the corrupted memory hardware, enabling Voyager 1 to begin transmitting data about the cosmos and continue its journey through deep space.
Those damn Klingons.. (Score:3)
Need to stop using our probes for target practice.
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It's the Trisolarons. Voyager 1 has now concluded there is no physics and has committed digital suicide.
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Re:Those damn Klingons.. (Score:5, Funny)
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Oops, arrest warrant was already issued in the name of Trisolarons.
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Those sneaky bggrs are forever altering memory to avoid consequences.
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I see your four digit UID and raise you four! Your move.
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Pawn to Deep Space Nine. Check.
A big thumbs up (Score:5, Insightful)
To whoever built the hardware for this probe. Operating continously for 46 years in hard vacuum is a triumph of reliability.
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This was the peak of hardware quality -- also including humans. While plenty of other gear made at that time was of poor quality, the very best space probes -- and the very smartest and best looking humans -- were made at that time. If you were not in the womb during Voyager 1&2 launches, you suffer from ongoing enshittification of everything. :p
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This was the peak of hardware quality -- also including humans.
Older generation claims that younger people are worse. I'm sure that has never happened before. /s
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No, no. I'm not claiming that older = better. It's only a specific generation that's the peak. To be exact, assuming no post-term pregnancy, you need to have been born between 1977-09-05 and 1978-05-27. Everyone who's either younger or older is inferior to those from the peak. :) And, judging from the quality of at least one human from that interval, quality of spacecraft hardware is no surprise.
(And some bits of that hardware start to wear out, dammit.)
Re:A big thumbs up (Score:4, Insightful)
More I think the generation that built them had management that encouraged reliability. They wanted to prove the quality of the devices they were building. The generation of products now is instead specifically built for the short profit cycle only, and anytime anyone in the current generation of people actually building things is stuck with management that shoots down suggestions of building for reliability if it has any cost to doing so.
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I think it's also a sum of no one knew any better so things were overd
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We have more reliable hardware now. If it was launching today we could do a redundant system and automatic failover.
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Re: A big thumbs up (Score:5, Insightful)
A big thumbs up to all the engineers reverse engineering whatâ(TM)s going wrong too. Thereâ(TM)s some really impressive sleuthing going into figuring out how to keep it alive even longer, 43 years after its mission was supposed to end.
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The engineers who designed those probes (Score:5, Insightful)
Need to be celebrated loudly and publicly - those who are still alive.
The engineers who keep this thing going too.
The Voyager probes are literally part of my life. I've always known them. For me, they're a fixture of the sky like the Sun and the Moon. They're precious little bits of living humanity far out there. If they die, something inside would die too, and I sure hope I kick the bucket before they do.
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They will bring doom to human species.
Especially if the Creator joins with Vygr.
Re: The engineers who designed those probes (Score:5, Funny)
They will bring doom to human species.
Especially if the Creator joins with Vygr.
V'ger? I hardly know her!
The classics never get old.
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Who needs Doom when we have Duke Nukem...
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And here I thought id [wikipedia.org] already did that.
Re:The engineers who designed those probes (Score:5, Interesting)
I was at an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Toronto when one of the Voyagers sent back the first pictures of Saturn's braided ring. Watching a bunch of scientists do back-of-napkin math and figure out that there were probably a couple of "shepherding moons" making it happen was one of the best examples of real science in the real world I've ever seen.
I'm 100% with you. When those little guys die, they'll take a piece of me with them.
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>I sure hope I kick the bucket before they do.
While the power and electronics fight to see who fails first, the "carry information out into the galaxy" part of the mission will very likely last the next 5 billion years at least. Someone has done the math and plotted the likely trajectories of the probes over that period, and calculated the amount of damage that is anticipated to be inflicted upon the golden records. They will be OK.
May you live a long and happy life knowing you're not going to outlast
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I meant active computing.
As long as those robots keep thinking with their tiny sixties electronic brains, they're as close to humanity's living children outside of the solar system.
When they stop thinking, sure, they'll carry data for aeons for someone or something to discover one day maybe, but no differently than a dead body would carry information in a side pocket. It's useful but it's not alive anymore.
I might very well stop thinking before they do. I'm a few years away from retirement and I smoked for
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amazing (Score:3, Insightful)
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>and here this thing is, exiting the galaxy.
In the remaining lifetime of the galaxy, this is conceivably possible, but I'm fairly confident if it happens, it'll happen as a consequence of our galaxy and Andromeda merging.
It's not terribly likely Voyager will gain the acceleration required to be ejected from the Milky Way any time before that.
https://www.space.com/predicti... [space.com]
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>and here this thing is, exiting the galaxy.
In the remaining lifetime of the galaxy, this is conceivably possible
Not really - its velocity is far below the escape velocity of the galaxy.
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Right... but there remain chances of gravitational interactions that change that. Space is big, stuff is far apart, Voyager moves pretty slowly relatively speaking... but it's not impossible.
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I'm no expert, but the only gravitational interaction I can think of that would take Voyager out of the Milky Way would be an extragalactic object passing through Voyager.
Re:amazing (Score:5, Informative)
This is also vanilla RAM. Well, rad-hardened to the best of their ability back then, but as far as I can tell, there's oy error-correction in transmissions, not in the RAM itself.
https://destevez.net/2021/12/v... [destevez.net]
Error-correcting RAM is used in business on Earth because cosmic rays can corrupt data over the brief lifespans of a business server. Imagine being in deep space with no atmosphere, no magnetosphere, and no heliosphere. The radiation the Voyagers are having to endure is orders of magnitude greater than designed for and for decades longer.
That a chip has fried is news because it's just one. NASA does amazingly well, but I doubt New Horizons will last as long, and I sincerely doubt any private firm will be capable of building a probe that can Voyager's achievements.
New Horizons? (Score:1)
> I doubt New Horizons will last as long
What does New Horizons lack in comparison? NH does have more capacity for software complex enough to have plenty of work-arounds.
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It's not what it lacks. It's because it uses newer components. As you make the transistors smaller and reduce the voltages, you increase the damage a cosmic ray strike will do. Yes, the chips are rad-hardened, but anything that gets through will have greater impact and have a greater risk of frying a component versus flipping the bit. The rad hardening will also have improved, but the risks will have increased faster than the protections.
However, there will undoubtedly be better error-correction in NH at ci
BUSTED CAP (Score:3)
Most likely a broken (open) capacitor, just like most failed earth-bound electronics. A remarkably common failure-mode, especially in electrolytics (which I doubt anyone is stupid enough to send into space, even NASA).
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Most likely a broken (open) capacitor, just like most failed earth-bound electronics. A remarkably common failure-mode, especially in electrolytics (which I doubt anyone is stupid enough to send into space, even NASA).
Are you saying the capacitor is in flux? A flux capacitor?
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Clearly that capacitor is "not fluxing" because Voyager passed 88 mph a long time ago, and would have disappeared into time by now.
Isn’t it already almost a day into the past now?
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Not military grade. Space grade. Much higher quality than military grade back then.
But yes, using higher quality capacitors would fix over half the problems we have with electrical equipment these days.
journey paused (Score:5, Insightful)
I have a feeling it's journey will continue whether it is transmitting anything or not...
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That will depend a lot on whether the Klingons and Trisolarons join forces.
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I have a feeling it's journey will continue whether it is transmitting anything or not...
Correct. Its current velocity is well above that needed for escape velocity for this solar system but it won't escape the Milky Way without help.
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/ [nasa.gov]
Tricky (Score:3)
Now they need to find not only a replacement chip of the same type but also a field service engineer willing to go out on a Saturday.
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You joke, but if you could be put in cryosleep and shot out there to catch up with it and fix it without any hope of return... well, ignoring the fact that would require superior technology and you might as well just send a new probe, I can think of worse ways to expend a human life.
Everybody dies, but not everyone gets the chance to fix humanity's first interstellar mission before doing so.
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You joke, but if you could be put in cryosleep and shot out there to catch up with it and fix it without any hope of return
Currently it takes just over 22 hours [nasa.gov] to send a message to the probe. If you could get a spacecraft to travel at 1/4 the speed of light, you're looking at a few days trip (if my math is correct). That would be like driving across the U.S.
The bigger problem would be you can't dock with the craft so you'd have to match speed and then figure out how to open the the craft (don't forget yo
Maybe it's not a glitch? (Score:2)
Probability of high energy particle damage? (Score:1)
Does anyone know the probability of a high energy particle (HEP) damaging such chips? In space HEP's can pack a punch. Even within the protection of Earth's magnetosphere, astronauts often report seeing sudden bright sparks or flashes. The theory is that HEP's are breaking up in the eye's liquid chamber or in the brain's image processing sections.
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I can tell you that at Cisco, customers reported a few random crashes every day that couldn't be explained any other way than cosmic rays.
We called them "acts of God".
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Comcast must have a lot of "God" in it.
Send out a NASA intern to change the part (Score:2)
Ya cheap bastards