totm apr 2024 Voyager 1 in critical condition

[darthgently]

8 hours ago, PakledHostage said:

This CNN article says Voyager 1 is back in business as of April 20th, following a firmware update that works around the bad memory location.

Huzzah!

I don't know how much elbow room they have but it would be great if the firmware could automatically detect emerging bad locations and add them to a list with no need to hardcode in firmware and update when this inevitably happens again.  Depending on the location affected they could be locked out next time

Edited April 23 by darthgently
spellig

[Nuke]

i figure there is a lot of free memory left as a lot of the devices that would consume most of it (like image buffers) are no longer needed/dont work/no longer have enough power.

Edited April 23 by Nuke

[darthgently]

1 hour ago, Nuke said:

i figure there is a lot of free memory left as a lot of the devices that would consume most of it (like image buffers) are no longer needed/dont work/no longer have enough power.

Yes, but if executable code ends up in a bad location and executed or a branch occurs based on garbled conditional arguments it could maybe brick or get stuck in a reboot loop.  I'm sure they thought about all this, I'm just curious if they were able to do anything more long term than hardcoding around this specific region given the unique constraints

Edited April 23 by darthgently
the grammrz

[kerbiloid]

So, https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/22/world/voyager-1-communication-issue-cause-fix-scn/index.html

Quote

A single chip responsible for storing part of the system’s memory, including some of the computer’s software code, isn’t working properly. While the cause of the chip’s failure is unknown, it could be worn out or may have been hit by an energetic particle from space, the team said.

The loss of the code on the chip caused Voyager 1’s science and engineering data to be unusable.

Since there was no way to repair the chip, the team opted to store the affected code from the chip elsewhere in the system’s memory. While they couldn’t pinpoint a location large enough to hold all of the code, they were able to divide the code into sections and store it in different spots within the flight data system.

Now we know, what the Voyager is working on.

Chips & Cola.

Edited April 23 by kerbiloid

[darthgently]

1 hour ago, kerbiloid said:

So, https://edition.cnn.com/2024/04/22/world/voyager-1-communication-issue-cause-fix-scn/index.html

Much more complicated than I realized. Woolly sheet.

So apparently they are executing the chip code on another processor now with lots of new jumps to the scattered code chunks.  Extremely impressive given the constraints

Much more complex than switching SCE to AUX

[PakledHostage]

4 hours ago, darthgently said:

Much more complex than switching SCE to AUX

Yes, but I'd say not comparable. One solution required multiple experts working for months to identify a cause and fix it, while the other involved a single expert knowing the system so well that they could immediately recognize the pattern of faults and know the solution. Both problems could have resulted in loss of the mission, but one was solved with only seconds within which to find a solution.

That's not to say that this Voyager patch isn't impressive as heck, but it's a different category of impressive than "SCE to AUX".

[PakledHostage]

This. Looks. Awesome.

 

(found in comments in an article about the repairs that are the subject of this thread)

[darthgently]

1 hour ago, PakledHostage said:

This. Looks. Awesome.

 

(found in comments in an article about the repairs that are the subject of this thread)

 Hopefully they follow up with the latest in a short sequel.  I'm just going by the trailer being a year old.  It does look excellent.  Most of the Gravitas vid are on YouTube, going to look for it...

Full documentary on premium: 

 

Edited April 23 by darthgently