Voyager 1 Returns To Normal Science Operations (theregister.com) 50
wgoodman shares a report from The Register: NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is back in action and conducting normal science operations for the first time since the veteran probe began spouting gibberish at the end of 2023. All four of the spacecraft's remaining operational instruments are now returning usable data to Earth, according to NASA. Some additional work is needed to tidy up the effects of the issue. Engineers need to resynchronize the timekeeping software of Voyager 1's three onboard computers to ensure that commands are executed at the correct times. Maintenance will also be performed on the digital tape recorder, which records some data from the plasma instrument for a six-monthly downlink to Earth.
Voyager 1's woes began in November 2023, when the spacecraft stopped transmitting usable data back to Earth. Rather than engineering and science data, NASA found itself faced with a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes, as though the spacecraft was somehow stalled. Engineers reckoned the issue lay with the Flight Data System (FDS) and in March sent a command -- dubbed a "poke" -- to get the FDS to try some other software sequences and thus circumvent whatever was causing the problem. The result was a complete memory dump from the computer, which allowed engineers to pinpoint where the corruption had occurred. It appeared that a single chip was malfunctioning, and engineers were faced with the challenge of devising a software update that would work around the defective hardware.
Usable engineering data began to be returned later in April, and in May the mission team sent commands to instruct the probe to keep science data flowing. The result was that the plasma wave subsystem and magnetometer instrument began sending data immediately. According to NASA, the cosmic ray subsystem and low energy charged particle instrument required a little more tweaking but are now operational. The rescue was made all the more impressive by the fact that it takes 22.5 hours for a command to reach Voyager 1 and another 22.5 hours for a response to be received on Earth.
Voyager 1's woes began in November 2023, when the spacecraft stopped transmitting usable data back to Earth. Rather than engineering and science data, NASA found itself faced with a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes, as though the spacecraft was somehow stalled. Engineers reckoned the issue lay with the Flight Data System (FDS) and in March sent a command -- dubbed a "poke" -- to get the FDS to try some other software sequences and thus circumvent whatever was causing the problem. The result was a complete memory dump from the computer, which allowed engineers to pinpoint where the corruption had occurred. It appeared that a single chip was malfunctioning, and engineers were faced with the challenge of devising a software update that would work around the defective hardware.
Usable engineering data began to be returned later in April, and in May the mission team sent commands to instruct the probe to keep science data flowing. The result was that the plasma wave subsystem and magnetometer instrument began sending data immediately. According to NASA, the cosmic ray subsystem and low energy charged particle instrument required a little more tweaking but are now operational. The rescue was made all the more impressive by the fact that it takes 22.5 hours for a command to reach Voyager 1 and another 22.5 hours for a response to be received on Earth.
Impressive engineering. (Score:5, Insightful)
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How fast is that in miles per hour? (I know, I know, but still)...
ChatGPT 4.o
Voyager 1 is currently traveling at approximately 38,028 miles per hour.
python
* Voyager 1's speed is often reported in astronomical units per year (AU/year) or kilometers per second (km/s).
* We'll convert it from one of these units to miles per hour (mph).
* Voyager 1's approximate speed in km/s
speed_km_per_s = 17.0
* Conversion factors
km_to_miles = 0.621371
seconds_per_hour = 3600
* Converting km/s to mph
speed_miles_per_hour = speed_
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At way more than half a century old, your mom is still faster than that.
Re: Impressive engineering. (Score:2)
So⦠just to benchmark this⦠easier or harder than phone-call walking your mom through finding that photo downloaded to Windows 8?
Re:Impressive engineering. (Score:5, Insightful)
On the other hand, there's fewer components in operational state, so there's fewer things you have to check. Having said that, kudos to NASA because diagnosing is one thing, bypassing the corrupted section is quite another.
Remember, folks, this isn't a modern system running Linux with CPU and memory hotswap enabled and the Bad RAM patch applied, this is a machine where they have to hot-swap modules entirely in machine code on a machine that was never built for the kind of tricks and techniques they're using, where not even any surviving programmers familiar with the system have much recent experience and will have forgotten most of the tricks and techniques.
I am, frankly, amazed they succeeded. This shows the brilliance of the minds at NASA, but also the incredible quality of the original design.
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Re:Impressive engineering. (Score:4, Interesting)
It's not THAT difficult or arcane.
According to this page it's a single failed bit in the program memory: https://spectrum.ieee.org/voya... [ieee.org]
You can either not put code in that location (jump around it) or put a value that works there.
I've hand-patched Z80 code in live EPROMS where you're only allowed to change 1s to 0s. Voyager has more sophisticated code update mechanisms than that.
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I got my start at 2400 baud, and spent a couple years working with remote systems over multi-hop RF links. Those were annoying enough.
Honestly though non-earth-orbiting spacecraft aren't being interacted with realtime. You send a full set of commands at once and await a response. It's not like someone is typing 'l' and waiting 45 hours to type the 's' and another 45 hours to hit enter.
Re: Impressive engineering. (Score:1)
I couldn't even have dreamed of 2400 baud.
t. 150 baud chad
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I started with a 300 baud modem that did 300bps. I could more or less read inbound text or code as it downloaded.
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The Voyagers were "built to last 5 years or so" only in the 'nudge, nudge, wink, wink, say no more' sense.
They had a primary mission that would take 5 years (visit Jupiter and Saturn) and funding for that mission. The engineers designed and built the spacecraft in a way that it would last as long as possible: they made sure not to make design decisions that would limit the lifetime of the spacecraft. Under the guise of 'make sure we can get to 5 years' they added lots of redundancy that has been helpful to
Re:Impressive engineering. (Score:4, Funny)
After Congress denied the funding for the Grand Tour the folks at NASA deliberately made sure to launch them during the only period in the next two centuries when that voyage would be possible. Then after Jupiter then went back to congress and said, "For this extra pittance we can extend the mission to planets where the Soviets can't reach. Don't you want to win your dick-wagging contest with the Politburo?" Every day after Saturn has been a mission extension.
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The biggest problem is the power supply. There simply isn't enough power to run the onboard instruments any more so most of them have been shut down.
It's expected that there won't be enough power for anything in the next few years so Voyager will go silent.
Ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Question (Score:3)
We recently had solar storms on Earth due to sunspot activity. Would Voyager 1 be able to detect any increase in radiation at that distance assuming the particles went in its directon? Would there be a spike on its detectors that we could see? Just curious.
Re:Question (Score:5, Informative)
Basically, yes.
You can actually look at the data at https://voyager-mac.umd.edu/ [umd.edu] - unfortunately, the pause in science observations was just during the recent storms.
However, since Voyagers are already beyond the heliopause, the effect is not really that visible.
Re:Question (Score:5, Informative)
Re:Question (Score:5, Insightful)
Voyager 1 passed through the heliopause and into interstellar space not too long ago, and one defining feature of that phenomenon is that it's where the solar wind stalls-out against the interstellar medium, whatever gases and particles that consists of, resulting in a bow shock.
So while V1 can probably still detect the actual EM radiation from a flare (since we can talk to it, it can undoubtedly see the sun too), it likely wouldn't notice a change in particle density caused by it, nor from the CME that sometimes accompanies a flare, because those would never reach it.
Imagine two boats traveling against a current, one upstream of the other. Occupants thereof can see each other, take measurements, communicate, etc. but the upstream boat doesn't react to the waves being kicked-up by the other, because those waves can't travel very far before they're stopped by the current.
(what, you expected a car analogy? :-P )
I have to wonder is that control software public (Score:1)
seems awefully reliable.
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Which version? It's hardware-dependent assembly code, not anything that normal humans can read and not anything that would work on any other device. It's been extensively modified over the years as hardware and memory failed and mission parameters have changed. Also, there are six computers on board, three primaries and three failovers. There's more info on the function and capabilities of each at the link.
https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/f... [nasa.gov]
There are three different computer types on the Voyager spacecraf
Ed Stone passed away (Score:5, Informative)
in related Voyager news: Ed Stone, who was the Project Scientist for Voyager for 50 years, 1972-2022, died this week [nasa.gov].
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Pretty neat to have your life's work function that long and outlive you.
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Children do it all the time.
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Yes, it says so at the bottom of the article you didn't read
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The article I didn't need to read because I already read the original NASA press release saying Voy 1 operations have been restored.
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I sincerely hope that he was able to hear that functionality had been restored before he died. [sigh]
22.5 hours (Score:4, Funny)
Space is big. You just won't believe how vastly, hugely, mind-bogglingly big it is. I mean, you may think it's a long way down the road to the chemist's, but that's just peanuts to space.
- Douglas Adams
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Out of curiosity, what kind of power do we need to send a signal that freakin' far?
Re:22.5 hours (Score:4, Informative)
It's a beautiful thing that the sphere of human technology is close to breaching the "light-day" unit of distance.
Re:22.5 hours (Score:5, Informative)
They use around 80 kW to send commands to Voyager 2, using a 70-meter antenna (DSS 43). The receiver on Voyager 2 has a failed capacitor which means the frequency it's tuned to is not stable. They have to find the correct frequency each time (by sending the same command at a bunch of frequencies until they get a response). For command sequences, they want to avoid a communications session getting interrupted in the middle by this capacitor drifting, so they send at more power which gives the receiver more margin.
Voyager 1 can still be reached using the 'normal' 20 kW transmitters, IIRC.
The Voyagers have a transmitter that can run at 12 or 18 W. For most communications sessions, it runs at 12 W.
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When the Grand Tour was proposed the technology didn't even exist to receive the signal from beyond Uranus, much less filter it out from the background noise.
Re: 22.5 hours (Score:1)
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Was it a duff memory chip? (Score:2)
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Re:Was it a duff memory chip? (Score:4, Insightful)
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Hot-swapping memory is non-trivial. I believe Linux has kernel support for memory and CPU hot-swap, and there is/was a Bad RAM patch that let you bypass corrupt memory blocks.
Hands up all those who trusted the code well enough to buy a motherboard with the necessary support so that they could test it out and help with maintenance.
Not even I had that much faith in it.
This hardware is a lot older and the code has to be right first time, where none of the programmers have anything like the kind of hands-on exp
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A dump truck has a much higher cargo capacity than a Ferrari.
Dump truck wins!!
Who Were the Programmers & Engineers Who Fixed (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:Who Were the Programmers & Engineers Who Fi (Score:4, Insightful)
If they ever do have to look for a new job - which seems unlikely - "maintenance, troubleshooting and successful repair of a 50-year-old piece of technology that's 15 billion miles away" is a pretty good line item for their CV.
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"Ah shit, another haughty know-it-all geezer with only legacy skills."
It's binary OP code, not magic. (Score:2)
A good low-level developer can probably learn the structure, build and perhaps even the layout of the CPU on the Voyager by heart within a few months. Most likely they have exact copied simulations of the entire Voyager system running on their workstation and laptops to try things out. And they built it in pseudo code before testing it which involves a completely separate team who's entire job it is to find holes in the first teams approach.
What is an impressive feat is finding all the tricks to replace cod
V'Ger (Score:2)
on its way to meet it's upgrader.
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V'ger? I hardly know her!
Deep dive (Score:2)