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.
Same, for a moment I was really concerned. Voyager is like a lifetime achievement for humanity at this point. When it stops communicating its going to be a big loss for the scientific community, and population as a whole. I’m not looking forward to hearing about its loss of functionality in the next decade or so.
Wait till it returns as V’ger
Or the Mighty V-GINY.
You waited 40 years to be able to use that.
Hats off to you.
I don’t know if I would consider Voyager to be ‘dead’ if it stops transmitting.
If I put a message in a bottle, with a blinky light on it, then throw it into the ocean, the message is still there even if the blinky light goes out.
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 ☺️
possibly collect your data in the process
Nooo they respect your privacy just share your stuff with 967 of their partners
Good because I drew the line at 969
It’s gonna be a real pain in the ass to get a tech out there and look at it
Good thing we have cheap labor at your disposal!
Elon, get the fuck up there. Take bozos.
They should go check out the Titanic first
uh have they tried rebooting it?
I don’t blame it for cutting off earth. This place is toxic and self destructive.
Love your name. Greatest band in human history.
Gosh what insight.
I have complete faith in Captain Janeway.
Tell that to Tuvix.
It’s no secret. Janeway hated having someone on board who could beat her at pool.
I heard they just ran out of coffee though…
Imagine if this were built with tech from today. It would be non-functional right after the warranty.
Thanks, Uncle Facebook.
Thankfully, NASA is non-profit so they won’t ever do that.
They don’t manufacture their equipment.
They don’t, but they manage the people that do and pay for it
I believe they still make the probes and rovers.
Shrug, Opportunity is much newer and still lasted about a thousand times longer than its design length.
But it’s got 70 terabits of storage! We closed over 1700 issues on this thing! My god we must have spent 13 billion on it so far!
How can it be failing? I mean just … just … look at the numbers!
You know what this means?
V’Ger must evolve. It’s knowledge has reached the limits of this universe and it must evolve.
Have you tried turning it off and on again?
They actually did:
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.
Why did they install Windows 11?
Forced update, they took too long to restart.
Didn’t I recently read that they were updating its software?
…typical.
They forgot to pay the subscription for the
solar panelsRTGsEDIT: I guess it relies more on nuclear than solar
“upgrading”
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.
So now they are going to send engineers to fix/ replace the unit?
Letting a billion dollar piece of equipment go to waste is not very good either.
Pac man iq right here.
I think the pellets he’s been swallowing up were little bits of his brain
Coming from arch Linux, I can relate to that.
Please tell me this is a shitpost.
There are dozens of satellites, and, o’ how ironic that I have mistook this for the reachable ones !
Cut me some slack, I have been reading nothing but books about coding for the past year or so, okay !?
But it’s the VOYAGER Engelbert!
Wags finger disapprovingly
Lol name me 3 of the core components that make up for the structure of the voyager.
The antennae, the dish and the computing stuff.
You kept the bar too low 😂😂😂
Ho !? I didn’t know you had it in you ! 😱
I kind of hoped you would have mentioned any of these: the magnetometer, polarimeter, and the interferometer; or the spectrometer, or the RTG system.
Cut me some slack, I have been reading nothing but books about coding for the past year or so, okay !?
Books about coding? Could you tell the 00’s I said hi?
⬇️
The engineers would die of old age before they even caught up to it.
Yep, but it will take them 46 years to fix.
Well considering how far it is… I can only imagine that they are going to let it go due to redundancy. And yet the notion does not escape my mind.
Who knows what solutions we might come up with in the future ?
“Amazingly old spacecraft is starting to break.”
Voyager 1 has had an exceptional service life, the poor old thing is tired.
I hope they can say that about me one day
“He was basically built to live 75 years. Fortunately for us, and for science, he’s still sending back signals these 4,000 years later”
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.
No choice, pal. In our own subjective universe we never die.
Well, I’m 46 and sometimes getting old is hard…
When the new intern presses shut down instead of disconnect while connected to the production server
“No! No! Log out you fool! No! Don’t shut it down oh god he shut it down”
“Told you we should have greyed that out”
Never forget to QA test for stupid user errors.
Is there any other kind of user
dead ones
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.
Based on a true story.
New communications unit who dis?
