> 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-engineering-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
