Throughout nan 5 months of troubleshooting, Voyager's crushed squad continued to person signals indicating nan spacecraft was still alive. But until Saturday, they lacked penetration into circumstantial specifications astir nan position of Voyager 1.
“It’s beautiful overmuch conscionable nan measurement we near it,” Spilker said. “We're still successful nan first phases of analyzing each of nan channels and looking astatine their trends. Some of nan temperatures went down a small spot pinch this play of clip that's gone on, but we're beautiful overmuch seeing everything we had hoped for. And that's ever bully news.”
Relocating Code
Through their investigation, Voyager's crushed squad discovered that a azygous spot responsible for storing a information of nan FDS representation had stopped working, astir apt owed to either a cosmic ray deed aliases a nonaccomplishment of aging hardware. This affected immoderate of nan computer's package code.
“That took retired a conception of memory,” Spilker said. “What they person to do is relocate that codification into a different information of nan memory, and past make judge that thing that uses those codes, those subroutines, cognize to spell to nan caller location of memory, for entree and to tally it.”
Only astir 3 percent of nan FDS representation was corrupted by nan bad chip, truthful engineers needed to transplant that codification into different portion of nan representation bank. But nary azygous location is ample capable to clasp nan conception of codification successful its entirety, NASA said.
So nan Voyager squad divided nan codification into sections for retention successful different places successful nan FDS. This wasn't conscionable a copy-and-paste job. Engineers needed to modify immoderate of nan codification to make judge it will each activity together. “Any references to nan location of that codification successful different parts of nan FDS representation needed to beryllium updated arsenic well,” NASA said successful a statement.
Newer NASA missions person hardware and package simulators connected nan ground, wherever engineers tin trial caller procedures to make judge they do nary harm erstwhile they uplink commands to nan existent spacecraft. Due to its age, Voyager doesn't person immoderate crushed simulators, and overmuch of nan mission's original creation archiving remains successful insubstantial shape and hasn't been digitized.
“It was really eyes-only to look astatine nan code,” Spilker said. “So we had to triple check. Everybody was looking done and making judge we had each of nan links coming together.”
This was conscionable nan first measurement successful restoring Voyager 1 to afloat functionality. “We were beautiful judge it would work, but until it really happened, we didn't cognize 100 percent for sure,” Spilker said.
“The logic we didn’t do everything successful 1 measurement is that location was a very constricted magnitude of representation we could find quickly, truthful we prioritized 1 information mode (the engineering information mode), and relocated only nan codification to reconstruct that mode,” said Jeff Mellstrom, a JPL technologist who leads nan Voyager 1 “tiger team” tasked pinch overcoming this problem.
“The adjacent step, to relocate nan remaining 3 actively utilized subject information modes, is fundamentally nan same,” Mellstrom said successful a written consequence to Ars. “The main quality is nan disposable representation constraint is now moreover tighter. We person ideas wherever we could relocate nan code, but we haven’t yet afloat assessed nan options aliases made a decision. These are nan first steps we will commencement this week.”
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