NASA’s 46-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft has experienced a computer glitch that prevents it from returning science data to Earth from the solar system’s outer reaches.
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has experienced a computer glitch that’s causing a bit of a communication breakdown between the 46-year-old probe and its mission team on Earth.
For those who didn’t read the article, voyager 1 is still sending and transmitting data. It’s stuck in a loop sending the same packets to Earth on repeat but it is receiving commands just fine. It’s not completely dark.
That's fantastic, that means all they have to do is reset some components and it should restore functionality. I say should, it's still a scary thing to turn on/off components om a satellite bcz you aren't guaranteed they'll come on. Nasa people usually prefer soft resets to hard resets of components, but we'll see what happens.
One of the satellites I worked on had to have a software update to do a soft reset of a component every time it tried to write certain data. It was really scary bcz we thought we had lost one of our redundancies right after launch, which would have sucked.
But, we didn't. Anyway, just wanted to give a little bit of insight into what the FOT might be thinking about while they're trying to recover the satellite to nominal state.
Yeah I got very sad when I saw the headline and breathed a huge sigh of relief. Voyager 1’s death will be far sadder than most public figures. Maybe any.
So the title did its job which is you understand nothing until you enter their site, drive traffic, display ads, and possibly collect your data in the process.
Sure and Lemmy did its work by letting me and others relay the info. I hate ads as much as the next guy, especially targeted ads, but the internet is free and I don’t pay CNN a dime so I’ll take the hit for you this time. Next time, you click the clickbait and fill us in ☺️
Ideally it was an update issue and it's fixable. However I wouldn't be surprised if there was a hardware failure due to radiation or something similar. That said, Voyager1 has power only until 2025 or so, since RTGs are designed to last that much. So even if the issue is fixed, its life will only expand by few years. Also, the fact it relies on nuclear power means none of the new stuff will last as long since they stopped using them some time ago due to fear from nuclear energy.
RTGs are still used for outer solar system missions. Not enough light for solar panels. Hell, even the Perseverance Mars rover, which was launched in 2020, has an RTG.
Bit of a misleading title. The voyager can still receive commands and send data to earth, the problem is that instead of useful data it just keeps sending repeating code of no use. Not a huge fan of these sensationalized and just blatantly wrong news article titles.
Haha I mean that's fair. Although I'm mainly just displeased with the title of the article. Its worded in a way that conveys that we've lost contact with the satellite completely, which is not the case. Just a bit too click baity for my tastes.
Engineers are working to resolve an issue with one of Voyager 1’s three onboard computers, called the flight data system (FDS). The spacecraft is receiving and executing commands sent from Earth; however, the FDS is not communicating properly with one of the probe’s subsystems, called the telemetry modulation unit (TMU). As a result, no science or engineering data is being sent back to Earth.
Nope! Not me. I'm kinda hoping to undershoot the median age. My warranty's expired and I really don't know if I'm up for the "maybe we can find parts at the You-Pick" stage of existence.
The Voyager team sent commands over the weekend for the spacecraft to restart the flight data system, but no usable data has come back yet, according to NASA.
Unfortunately, that didn't help. So now they'll have to find out what's causing this, and then see if they can fix it.
Ah, time to reconfigure the IP address. Just set that, and *click* bring down network port, and *click* bring it up again... *click* ... *click* ... oh.
I bet there’s something out there, at 22.5 light hours, that the aliens don’t want us to know about. After V1 passes through this thing they don’t want us to detect, they’ll allow the glitch to be fixed.
And your contribution is notably worse, as well as toxic, imo. Rehashing the same rhetoric about how forums are similar, no matter where you go online... maybe you spent too much time on reddit yourself, or on forums in general. I hate the statement "go touch grass", but you're literally breathing life into it right now.
At least they contributed something I enjoyed reading. Don't be a jerk
Edit: Nvm, I'm wasting my time. Looking at your comments and you're obviously just flaming shit like a common troll, or someone who really is a jerk. Don't care either way. Thanks for contributing your vitriol