Voyager 1 Please Call Home

Gord_in_Toronto

Penultimate Amazing
Gord_in_Toronto
Joined
Jul 22, 2006
Messages
26,487
It looks as if control of Voyager 1 has been lost.

NASA Engineers Are Racing to Fix Voyager 1

A fix may be found but no great hope is held.

Voyager 1 is still alive out there, barreling into the cosmos more than 15 billion miles away. However, a computer problem has kept the mission's loyal support team in Southern California from knowing much more about the status of one of NASA's longest-lived spacecraft.
Click to expand...

However, not a bad record for fifty-year old technology.

15 billion miles!
 
In the next few weeks, Voyager's ground team plans to transmit commands for Voyager 1 to try to isolate where the suspected corrupted memory lies within the FDS computer. One of the ideas involves switching the computer to operate in different modes, such as the operating parameters the FDS used when Voyager 1 was flying by Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980. The hope among Voyager engineers is that the transition to different data modes might reveal what part of the FDS memory needs a correction.

This is a lot more complicated than it might seem on the surface. For one thing, the data modes engineers might command Voyager 1 into haven't been used for 40 years or more. Nobody has thought about doing this with Voyager's flight data computer for decades.
Click to expand...

In the absence of an astronaut to push the home button, this seems like the closest thing to turning Voyager 1 off and on again.
 
I saw this in an ad put out by Alians
Wanted: Someone to study an old human spacecraft. Must find out the level of technology used.
 
Such an amazing piece of kit. And was put together quickly (by space probe standards).

To be working for so long is such an achievement. I would argue one of the great engineering achievements of the 20th century.
 
Agreed, I don't think anybody thought it would last that long. Sleep well my friend.

Until there's one last signal that could make for a good sci-fi movie.
 
I'm going to ask some LLM to make a picture of aliens placing a Polaroid on a stick in front of the Voyager-1 camera to hide their pleasure planet.
It's the most likely explanation for the signal loss and now recovery
 
Mike Helland said:
Seems there's some hope:

https://ca.news.yahoo.com/voyager-1-sputters-back-life-172910976.html

https://blogs.nasa.gov/sunspot/2024...rogress-toward-understanding-voyager-1-issue/
Click to expand...

From both links:

Troubleshooting an issue with a spacecraft traveling through interstellar space is complicated. It takes about 22.5 hours for a message from Earth to reach the spacecraft and another 22.5 hours for a response back to Earth.
Click to expand...

Same as debugging your code 50 years ago when you were programing in FORTRAN for a batch mainframe and had to get your changes keypunched and your line-printer out delivered to you from the data centre. Ah. Memories. :w2:
 
wobs said:
Such an amazing piece of kit. And was put together quickly (by space probe standards).

To be working for so long is such an achievement. I would argue one of the great engineering achievements of the 20th century.
Click to expand...
And here we are, 50 yrs later, and can't even land an unmanned probe (upright) on the moon. Don't tell me our education system hasn't failed us!
 
bigred said:
And here we are, 50 yrs later, and can't even land an unmanned probe (upright) on the moon. Don't tell me our education system hasn't failed us!
Click to expand...
Voyager is not landing anywhere, nor is it designed to do so. IIRC, it can't even steer itself to any great extent. It's just been flung out there on a very precise course, and asked to phone home occasionally with happy-snaps as it goes by any interesting sights or meets any new folks.
 
Utterly jaw dropping.

What a monument to the original designers and engineers and the team today.
 
I wonder if Carl Sagan ever envisaged that we would still be communicating with these probes almost 30 years after he sadly died?
 
bigred said:
And here we are, 50 yrs later, and can't even land an unmanned probe (upright) on the moon. Don't tell me our education system hasn't failed us!
Click to expand...
Turns out landing an unmanned probe (upright) on the moon is pretty damned hard. Also, something that "we" absolutely nailed fifty years ago.
 
You must log in or register to reply here.

Back
Top Bottom