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Voyager 1 Communicating Intelligibly Again

lpetrich

lpetrich

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Half a year ago, the Voyager 1 spacecraft suffered a computer-system malfunction. Engineers Working to Resolve Issue With Voyager 1 Computer – The Sun Spot On 2023 November 14, the spacecraft's flight data system (FDS) started sending back nonsense: repetitive patterns of 0's and 1's.

Finding solutions to challenges the probes encounter often entails consulting original, decades-old documents written by engineers who didn’t anticipate the issues that are arising today. As a result, it takes time for the team to understand how a new command will affect the spacecraft’s operations in order to avoid unintended consequences.
Click to expand...
Decades-old documents? The two Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977, nearly half a century ago.

Also, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is 22.5 hours away by light ray, meaning a round-trip time of nearly 2 days.

NASA Engineers Make Progress Toward Understanding Voyager 1 Issue – Voyager

On March 1 of this year, the Voyager team sent a "poke" command to their spacecraft, to try to get a readout of the spacecraft's memory. On March 3, they got something back, and they determined that it was indeed a readout.

Engineers Pinpoint Cause of Voyager 1 Issue, Are Working on Solution – Voyager
Using the readout, the team has confirmed that about 3% of the FDS memory has been corrupted, preventing the computer from carrying out normal operations.

The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn’t working.
Click to expand...

NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
The team got around that problem by moving the affected code to different places in the FDS, complete with updating references to each other.
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.

During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.
Click to expand...
 
lpetrich said:
Half a year ago, the Voyager 1 spacecraft suffered a computer-system malfunction. Engineers Working to Resolve Issue With Voyager 1 Computer – The Sun Spot On 2023 November 14, the spacecraft's flight data system (FDS) started sending back nonsense: repetitive patterns of 0's and 1's.

Finding solutions to challenges the probes encounter often entails consulting original, decades-old documents written by engineers who didn’t anticipate the issues that are arising today. As a result, it takes time for the team to understand how a new command will affect the spacecraft’s operations in order to avoid unintended consequences.
Click to expand...
Decades-old documents? The two Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977, nearly half a century ago.

Also, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is 22.5 hours away by light ray, meaning a round-trip time of nearly 2 days.

NASA Engineers Make Progress Toward Understanding Voyager 1 Issue – Voyager

On March 1 of this year, the Voyager team sent a "poke" command to their spacecraft, to try to get a readout of the spacecraft's memory. On March 3, they got something back, and they determined that it was indeed a readout.

Engineers Pinpoint Cause of Voyager 1 Issue, Are Working on Solution – Voyager
Using the readout, the team has confirmed that about 3% of the FDS memory has been corrupted, preventing the computer from carrying out normal operations.

The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn’t working.
Click to expand...

NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
The team got around that problem by moving the affected code to different places in the FDS, complete with updating references to each other.
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.

During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...
Good news they got it up again!
 
So are there new engineers learning how to work with the Voyagers or is there a room of only three or four guys that know how it works? This is very old engineered tech.
 
Voyager 1 is one of five spacecraft sent out of the Solar System.  List of artificial objects leaving the Solar System
  • Pioneer 10 - Lau 1972 - Jup 1973 - end 2003 - dist 135.017 AU - vel 11.8 km/s
  • Pioneer 11 - Lau 1973 - Jup 1974 - Sat 1979 - end 1995 - dist 112.879 AU - vel 11.1 km/s
  • Voyager 1 - Lau 1977 - Jup 1979 - Sat 1980 - still active - dist 162.043 AU - vel 16.9 km/s
  • Voyager 2 - Lau 1977 - Jup 1979 - Sat 1981 - Ura 1986 - Nep 1989 - still active - dist 135.198 AU - vel 15.2 km/s
  • New Horizons - Lau 2006 - Jup 2007 - Plu 2015 - Arr 2019 - still active - dist 57.707 AU - vel 13.7 km/s
Distances and velocities are for December 17, 2023.

AU = astronomical unit, the average Earth-Sun distance
Arr = Kuiper Belt Object 486958 Arrokoth

On 1990 February 14, at a distance of 40 AU / 6 billion km / 3.7 billion mi, the Voyager 1 spacecraft was commanded to take a "family portrait" of the Solar System, including a picture of our homeworld:  Family Portrait (Voyager) with  Pale Blue Dot

The pictures in that portrait were the last pictures that either spacecraft took, because the cameras were soon shut down. There isn't much to see, except if one wants to try to measure parallaxes of stars.
 
bilby said:
Before:

000111000111000111000111000111000111

After:

cold, dark, vacuum...cold, dark, vacuum...cold, dark, vacuum...cold, dark, vacuum...cold, dark, vacuum...cold, dark, vacuum...
Click to expand...
At least it didn't get hijacked. That's better than having a probe going out with a rick roll or a message about someone's spaceship's extended warranty.
 
I doubt a memory chip made today would last 50 years in space. Not even that on earth.

A good reminder why documentation, as painful as it can, be is important.

Who made its batteries or power supply?
 
lpetrich said:
The pictures in that portrait were the last pictures that either spacecraft took, because the cameras were soon shut down. There isn't much to see, except if one wants to try to measure parallaxes of stars.
Click to expand...
What about all those aliens out there? We need pictures.
 
lpetrich said:
Half a year ago, the Voyager 1 spacecraft suffered a computer-system malfunction. Engineers Working to Resolve Issue With Voyager 1 Computer – The Sun Spot On 2023 November 14, the spacecraft's flight data system (FDS) started sending back nonsense: repetitive patterns of 0's and 1's.

Finding solutions to challenges the probes encounter often entails consulting original, decades-old documents written by engineers who didn’t anticipate the issues that are arising today.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

This is why you need good tech writers behind the engineers, so their documentation will be as useful and detailed and accurate as possible. It's what we do.

lpetrich said:
As a result, it takes time for the team to understand how a new command will affect the spacecraft’s operations in order to avoid unintended consequences.
Click to expand...
Decades-old documents? The two Voyager spacecraft were launched in 1977, nearly half a century ago.

Also, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is 22.5 hours away by light ray, meaning a round-trip time of nearly 2 days.

NASA Engineers Make Progress Toward Understanding Voyager 1 Issue – Voyager

On March 1 of this year, the Voyager team sent a "poke" command to their spacecraft, to try to get a readout of the spacecraft's memory. On March 3, they got something back, and they determined that it was indeed a readout.

Engineers Pinpoint Cause of Voyager 1 Issue, Are Working on Solution – Voyager
Using the readout, the team has confirmed that about 3% of the FDS memory has been corrupted, preventing the computer from carrying out normal operations.

The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn’t working.
Click to expand...

NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
The team got around that problem by moving the affected code to different places in the FDS, complete with updating references to each other.
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.

During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

Pretty cool. That must have been so gratifying to get those updates.
 
For nonvolatile program code memory there was EPROM. A programmable memory chip erased by UV light through a window in the chip.

en.wikipedia.org

EPROM - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

Then came EEPROM electrically erasable programmable read only memory. A big deal in the day. You could remotely change code in hardware over a telephone line.

en.wikipedia.org

EEPROM - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

The power supplies were nuclear decay thermoses with thermostatic power generation.

en.wikipedia.org

Radioisotope thermoelectric generator - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org

The processors were custom built with chips. Common in the day. There were chip sets to build your own processor.

Bit slice chips-typically, one, two, or four bits wide- contain all of the circuits necessary to perform a large number of ALU functions, including arithmetic, logic, register storage, and even I/O, for their segment of a processor word.
Click to expand...

en.wikipedia.org

Voyager program - Wikipedia

en.wikipedia.org en.wikipedia.org
 
Tigers! said:
I doubt a memory chip made today would last 50 years in space. Not even that on earth.

A good reminder why documentation, as painful as it can, be is important.

Who made its batteries or power supply?
Click to expand...
Power supply is nuclear, I don't think it has batteries. No moving parts but the Pu-238 in the generator decays over time and eventually they will go dark because they don't have enough power to talk to Earth. Much of their equipment has already been turned off due to a lack of power.
 
lpetrich said:
The team got around that problem by moving the affected code to different places in the FDS, complete with updating references to each other.
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.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

39 billion kilometers.
Not 24.

....just sayin' is all.

39 billion km and growing.

main-qimg-4c7a13de89dc2126a73f8a75fd14d10f
 
Lion IRC said:
lpetrich said:
The team got around that problem by moving the affected code to different places in the FDS, complete with updating references to each other.
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.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

39 billion kilometers.
Not 24.

....just sayin' is all.

39 billion km and growing.

main-qimg-4c7a13de89dc2126a73f8a75fd14d10f
Click to expand...

Where exactly are you getting that?

22.5 hours speed of light is ~299,790 km/s x 3600 s/hr x 22.5 hr ~= 24.3 B km

24.3 B km ~= 15.1 B miles
 
Lion IRC said:
lpetrich said:
The team got around that problem by moving the affected code to different places in the FDS, complete with updating references to each other.
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.
Click to expand...
Click to expand...

39 billion kilometers.
Not 24.

....just sayin' is all.

39 billion km and growing.

main-qimg-4c7a13de89dc2126a73f8a75fd14d10f
Click to expand...
If I were to be formal and exact I would include the published uncertainties of the second, and kilometer, and speed of light.

It is neither 24 nor 39 million. Just sayin'.

For routine calculations 300,00 km/s for C is used.
 
steve_bank said:
I were to be formal and exact I would include the published uncertainties of the second, and kilometer, and speed of light.
Click to expand...
There is zero uncertainty in the value of the speed of light; It is defined exactly, by fiat, as 299,792,458ms-1

There is very little uncertainty in the value of the second; It is defined as 9,192,631,770 times the hyperfine transition frequency of 133Cs, and can be measured very accurately indeed.

The uncertainty in the length of the metre is (comparatively) large, in the order of one part in 1012, and it is futile to concern oneself with the relatively trivial uncertainty in the value of the second, given this mammoth 0.00000000001% uncertainty regarding how long a metre is.
 
The metre was defined in terms of the second in 1983, by fixing the speed of light in a vacuum, and the kilogram in 2019, by fixing Planck's constant. Thus using relativity and quantum mechanics.
 
The second has an uncertainty attached.

C defined as exactly 299,792,458 m/s is an abstraction. It can not be exactly demonstrated. The numerical value can be anything depending on the system.
In a system based on a sand clock and furlongs C would be defined as furlongs/grains of sand.

The current numerical vale makes C consistent with the SI units used internationally by science. Seconds, meters, and C have to jive to match observation and experiment.
 
Tigers! said:
I doubt a memory chip made today would last 50 years in space. Not even that on earth.
Click to expand...
Research radiation-hardened computer chips. They are used in spacecraft, and that's why spacecraft CPU chips may seem behind the times.
Who made its batteries or power supply?
Click to expand...
This is not a typical laptop or desktop computer. This is a spacecraft. Tigers!, you are on the Internet, and you can easily find out about spacecraft design.

The main source of electric power for spacecraft is solar panels, but that obviously does not work well in the outer Solar System. So that is why outer-Solar-System spacecraft use radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTG's).
 
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