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The diagnosis is in—bad memory knocked NASA’s aging Voyager 1 offline (arstechnica.com)

submitted 5 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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"Engineers are optimistic they can find a way for the FDS to operate normally."

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[–] [email protected] 13 points 5 months ago (1 children)

This is the best summary I could come up with:

Engineers have determined why NASA's Voyager 1 probe has been transmitting gibberish for nearly five months, raising hopes of recovering humanity's most distant spacecraft.

The FDS duties include packaging Voyager 1's science and engineering data for relay to Earth through the craft's Telemetry Modulation Unit and radio transmitter.

Suzanne Dodd, NASA's project manager for the twin Voyager probes, told Ars in February that this was one of the most serious problems the mission has ever faced.

Due to the Voyagers' age, engineers had to reference paper documents, memos, and blueprints to help understand the spacecraft's design details.

After months of brainstorming and planning, teams at JPL uplinked a command in early March to prompt the spacecraft to send back a readout of the FDS memory.

"The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn’t working," NASA said in an update posted Thursday.

The original article contains 668 words, the summary contains 153 words. Saved 77%. I'm a bot and I'm open source!

[–] [email protected] 56 points 5 months ago (2 children)

Important points missed by the bot:

FDS is the Flight Data Subsystem:

The Flight Data Subsystem was an innovation in computing when it was developed five decades ago. It was the first computer on a spacecraft to use volatile memory. Most of NASA's missions operate with redundancy, so each Voyager spacecraft launched with two FDS computers. But the backup FDS on Voyager 1 failed in 1982.

They identified the problem:

The command worked, and Voyager.1 responded with a signal different from the code the spacecraft had been transmitting since November. After several weeks of meticulous examination of the new code, engineers pinpointed the locations of the bad memory.

They think they can work around the problem:

"Although it may take weeks or months, engineers are optimistic they can find a way for the FDS to operate normally without the unusable memory hardware, which would enable Voyager 1 to begin returning science and engineering data again," NASA said.

[–] [email protected] 11 points 5 months ago

Thank you kind human

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago (1 children)

FDS is the Flight Data Subsystem:

Not to be confused with the Famicom Disk System, First Date Sex, or Feminine Deodorant Spray.

[–] [email protected] 1 points 5 months ago

Fuk Dat Shit