Voyager 1 returning science data again
The four instruments on NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft are returning science data for the first time since a computer malfunction last November.
Respect to the computer scientist who sorted that out. That has got to be an extremely satisfying bug to fix.
As a software engineer, I'm still trying to figure out their build pipeline. That thing has got to be interesting.
This legitimately made me sad when I heard they might lose this satellite. It's the farthest humans have ever sent anything beyond Earth, and it might always be the case. The science data coming back from this is invaluable.
We'll surely get faster. Remember that Voyager 1 actually made a pass around one of the planets (Jupiter?) specifically to slow it down so that it could start gathering data. It would not be (relatively speaking) hard to send something out at a far greater velocity.
Incredible that we can still receive the signal after all this time over such a vast distance. I wish we made our current devices with such longevity in mind 😉😄
Voyager is the Nokia of space probes: practically obsolete, code written in ancient runes almost nobody can still decipher and read... yet still keeps on ticking.
How the actual fuck is a signal being sent 24 billion kilometres? That's nuts
Get a big enough dish and you can do wild shit. Arecibo observatory was able to use radar to map the surface of Venus to like 1km resolution.
Headline implicates that it was returning non-science data so far lol
It was sending memory images of its RAM. So that's not wrong.
since November 2023, when a computer malfunction on board the spacecraft caused it to return garbled data.
Cat images
Pushing software updates with an almost 24 hour latency, nice
Sounds like my webpack build.
V'Ger
This makes me genuinely happy. Not much uplifting news actually uplifts me these days. This is one of the rare headlines that does.
I thought i thought this was solved weeks ago?
They figured out how to resolve it weeks ago.
It has taken this long to implement the results, and to get usable data flowing again
I'm sure it wasn't aliens :: x files music ::
That's what I thought too, until I read
The announcement that Voyager 1’s instruments were returning data again came two days after JPL announced the passing of Ed Stone, who served as Voyager’s project scientist from the mission’s inception in 1972 until 2022.
And realized it was the ghost of Ed Stone.
That makes more sense. He just flipped the bit while he was on his way.
