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Voyager Status, What is it?
Bernard1963
post Mar 14 2024, 09:22 AM
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I gather a bare bones version of the FDS software was loaded and thats how comms has been restored. I assume its now a case of running tests to find the faulty area of memory.
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mcaplinger
post Mar 14 2024, 04:32 PM
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QUOTE (Explorer1 @ Mar 13 2024, 07:36 PM) *
There's a 2022 documentary [url="https://www.imdb.com/title/tt17658964/"]about the team that's very informative.

Excellent and available on Prime Video. I seem to have something in my eye...
QUOTE (Bernard1963 @ Mar 14 2024, 02:22 AM) *
I gather a bare bones version of the FDS software was loaded and thats how comms has been restored.

It's hard to tell since the blog has been so dumbed down.
QUOTE
This new signal resulted from a command sent to Voyager 1 on March 1. Called a “poke” by the team, the command is meant to gently prompt the FDS to try different sequences in its software package in case the issue could be resolved by going around a corrupted section.

Doesn't sound like new software to me, but it might be a patch of some kind.


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Disclaimer: This post is based on public information only. Any opinions are my own.
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Floyd
post Mar 14 2024, 06:03 PM
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In some old computer languages, the peek command was used to read a location in memory and a poke command to write to memory. No idea if they poked some addresses in memory to program the peek into memory that was returned????


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Tom Tamlyn
post Mar 14 2024, 06:46 PM
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Thanks Explorer1 for suggesting It's Quieter in the Twilight. It's available for streaming from PBS, and it's an interesting documentary, quite moving, as mcaplinger noted upthread.

And I now recall reading a good New York Times piece (gift link below) about the same team.

QUOTE
The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA’s Voyager Probes Across the Universe
As the Voyager mission is winding down, so, too, are the careers
of the aging explorers who expanded our sense of home in the galaxy.
New York Times (Aug. 3, 2017).

https://www.nytimes.com/2017/08/03/magazine...;smid=url-share
The article contains a passage which I had obviously forgotten when I posted yesterday:
QUOTE
Unlike the astrophysicists who devise experiments for Voyager and who interpret the results, the core flight-team members don’t have the luxury of being able to work simultaneously on other missions. Over decades, the crew members who have remained have forgone promotions, the lure of nearby Silicon Valley and, more recently, retirement, to stay with the spacecraft.


I wonder to what extent the team has been able to rely on additional resources outside of their team during the current crisis.
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stevesliva
post Mar 14 2024, 08:04 PM
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My speculation is that the "dump memory" routine was in instruction memory that they decided to command the FDS to try. I would not guess they changed the instruction memory, because then it'd be running the program they expected, not "eureka! it's a core dump." (Commanding might simply be "start program at this instruction address" but it's not really worth clarifying that because it'll come out in time.)

As forecast on Feb 2:

QUOTE
In the next few weeks, Voyager's ground team plans to transmit commands for Voyager 1 to try to isolate where the suspected corrupted memory lies within the FDS computer. One of the ideas involves switching the computer to operate in different modes, such as the operating parameters the FDS used when Voyager 1 was flying by Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980. The hope among Voyager engineers is that the transition to different data modes might reveal what part of the FDS memory needs a correction.

This is a lot more complicated than it might seem on the surface. For one thing, the data modes engineers might command Voyager 1 into haven't been used for 40 years or more. Nobody has thought about doing this with Voyager's flight data computer for decades.


... so what I'm speculating is that one of those "modes" had a "dump memory" routine and they didn't expect it.
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Bernard1963
post Mar 16 2024, 12:45 AM
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QUOTE (mcaplinger @ Mar 14 2024, 04:32 PM) *
Excellent and available on Prime Video. I seem to have something in my eye...

It's hard to tell since the blog has been so dumbed down.

Doesn't sound like new software to me, but it might be a patch of some kind.


My comment about a new FDS software isnt from the blog article.
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mcaplinger
post Mar 16 2024, 03:20 AM
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QUOTE (Bernard1963 @ Mar 15 2024, 05:45 PM) *
My comment about a new FDS software isnt from the blog article.

Then where is it from?


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