Australian Atheists Forum

Irrev-Black wrote: ↑Thu Feb 29, 2024 9:09 am Ah, me old mate Hugh Manera!

"There were certainly things we could've done to test it and actually fire it. They would've been very time-consuming and very costly,"

You are unfair to Hugh. One of the senior people on the team Prof. O'Tier, also needs to take responsibility.

stylofone wrote: ↑Thu Feb 29, 2024 10:06 am

Irrev-Black wrote: ↑Thu Feb 29, 2024 9:09 am Ah, me old mate Hugh Manera!

"There were certainly things we could've done to test it and actually fire it. They would've been very time-consuming and very costly,"

You are unfair to Hugh. One of the senior people on the team Prof. O'Tier, also needs to take responsibility.

Maybe that man, Edgement?

“According to the acquired data, some temperature sensors and unused battery cells are starting to malfunction, but the majority of functions that survived the first lunar night was maintained even after the second lunar night!” JAXA wrote on X.

SLIM, short for Smart Lander for Investigating Moon, landed on the Moon on January 19, making Japan the fifth country to successfully put a spacecraft on the dusty lunar surface. About three hours after landing, however, JAXA was forced to shut down the spacecraft’s system because SLIM’s solar cells were not generating enough electricity.

NASA engineers have narrowed down the problem with the Voyager 1 deep space probe to a single faulty chip. It may now be possible to work around the corrupted memory and return the 47-year old interstellar spacecraft to an operational condition.

Since November, NASA has been trying to repair the Voyager 1 probe, which has been sending back gibberish instead of science and engineering data. It's hard enough trying to fix a piece of technology that dates back to the time of paper tape memories. It's downright frustrating when it's over 15 billion miles (24 billion km) from Earth and it takes two days to get a reply to any signals sent to it.

Then came the breakthrough on March 1, when one of a long string of commands was sent trying to get a response from Voyager 1. Two days later, a string of gibberish came back to Mission Control, only it was different gibberish that one engineer at NASA's Deep Space Network recognized and was able to decode.

This turned out to be a dump of the onboard computer's complete memory that gave NASA engineers vital clues to the problem and the hope of solving it. It was already known that the trouble was in the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), which controls packaging data for transmission to Earth. Now, the fault has been narrowed down to a particular chip that may have failed due to old age or being struck by a cosmic ray particle.

In a stellar display of problem-solving, NASA has restored contact with the legendary Voyager 1 probe after five months of radio silence. The 46-year-old spacecraft went dark last November when a key computer chip failed, garbling the engineering data it beams across 15 billion miles of space.

Rather than accept defeat, mission engineers devised an audacious workaround — rewriting the corrupted software from scratch and relocating it piecemeal into unaffected areas of the probe's computer memory.

NSFVoyager2@techhub.social
NSFVoyager2
@NSFVoyager2@techhub.social

I am currently 18h 52m 04s of light travel time from Earth (2024:127:000000:1L)

AkaSci@fosstodon.org
AkaSci
@AkaSci@fosstodon.org

Six months after it suffered a serious brain injury and after months of mind-boggling ultra-long-distance surgery, the Voyager 1 spacecraft walked and talked at full data rate today!

After transmitting a full memory readout on Friday at 40 bps, Voyager 1 switched to the science-mode 160 bps rate, which presumably the DSN site at Goldstone was able to receive and decode today.

Congrats and kudos to all who made it happen.
:mastodance:
https://eyes.nasa.gov/dsn/dsn.html