That's cool but dammit, I'm still waiting for my Jetson's flying car.lol
Ted
-Original Message-
From: PLUG On Behalf Of Keith Lofstrom
Sent: Wednesday, April 24, 2024 4:57 AM
To: plug@lists.pdxlinux.org
Subject: [PLUG] Voyager 1 ... END of Radio silence (was: Radio silence since
Apr 16)
> Subject: Re: [PLUG] Radio silence since Apr 16 On 4/23/24 10:02, Paul
> Heinlein wrote:
> >Is this list dead? Neither my inbox nor the online archives show any
> >traffic since April 16.
On the subject of "no traffic":
This isn't PLUG or Linux, and it might belong in plug-talk, but it IS the
most audacious, humongous, glorious, ULTRA-long distance debug session and
clever code hack:
Restoring NASA's Voyager 1 to operability.
https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/04/22/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-en
gineering-updates-to-earth/
Voyager 1 is 24 billion kilometers from Earth, 160 times farther from the
Sun than Earth is, three times farther than Pluto.
Voyager 2 is still doing well, but Voyager 1 went radio
silent on November 14, 2023. "No Traffic".
Using early 1970s technology, custom CMOS chips and 7400 series Texas
Instruments TTL, the three Voyager 1 computers and their 32K bytes of shared
memory are a space-grade distant cousin to the first computer I wired for
myself with equally primitive chips. JPL did a much better job, of course.
The Problem: a memory interface chip in Voyager 1's Flight Data Subsystem
failed, so some code and data memory became unavailable. The remaining
memory kept Voyager 1 oriented and taking data and listening to Earth, but
aphasic, unable to format and transmit data to distant receivers on Earth.
The JPL team fault-treed their way to the defect, designed new software with
workarounds, and uploaded it. The team is still tweaking and upgrading the
code, but Voyager 1 is talking to Earth again. Therapy continues.
NASA announced their success on Monday April 22; I just heard about it.
Keith L.
--
Keith Lofstrom kei...@keithl.com