The Liberty Conservative- Engineers Successfully Restore 1970s-era Computer on NASA’s Voyager 1 Spacecraft
After five months of intense troubleshooting, engineers have successfully partially restored a 1970s-era computer on NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft. The breakthrough came last month when engineers were able to pinpoint the location of the problem in the spacecraft’s Flight Data Subsystem (FDS) memory.
A new signal was sent to Voyager 1 on Thursday to recode part of the memory of the FDS. Due to the immense distance of over 15 billion miles from Earth, it takes nearly two days for engineers to uplink a command to Voyager 1 and receive a response.
On Saturday, a signal was received from Voyager 1 for the first time in five months after the command was sent. The ground team discovered that a single chip in the FDS memory had stopped working, likely due to a cosmic ray hit or hardware failure.
To restore the spacecraft’s normal operations, engineers relocated the code affected by the bad chip into other parts of the FDS memory. This successful restoration is a testament to the dedication and ingenuity of NASA’s engineering team.
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and has been exploring deep space for over four decades. It is currently the most distant human-made object from Earth, making its restoration a remarkable achievement in space exploration. NASA continues to push the boundaries of what is possible in space exploration, paving the way for future missions to the far reaches of our solar system and beyond.
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