All from billions of miles away
NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has begun returning usable engineering data after engineers devised a way to work around a damaged memory chip.The chip's failure made science and engineering data from the probe unusable, and posed a challenge for engineers. The chip contained some of the FDS computer's code, but simply shifting that code elsewhere wasn't an option – no single location was large enough to hold it.
The solution was to break the code into sections, tweak them so they still functioned as a whole, and store them in different places in the FDS. Any references to the code's location would also need to be updated. The spacecraft is currently more than 15 billion miles from Earth, meaning that a radio signal from Earth takes approximately 22.5 hours to reach it and the same again to get a response.Engineers started with the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft's engineering data and sent it to its new location on April 18.
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