Posted on 04/23/2024 9:04:41 AM PDT by Red Badger
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is depicted in this artist’s concept traveling through interstellar space, or the space between stars, which it entered in 2012. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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After some inventive sleuthing, the mission team can — for the first time in five months — check the health and status of the most distant human-made object in existence.
For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars).
Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed that the issue was tied to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth.
After receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in five months, members of the Voyager flight team celebrate in a conference room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on April 20. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.
So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.
The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.
During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.
Voyager 2 continues to operate normally. Launched over 46 years ago, the twin Voyager spacecraft are the longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history. Before the start of their interstellar exploration, both probes flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune.
Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA.
Knew a gal once who made a very good living because she was one of the last few Fortran programmers in existence.
Pretty incredible, isn’t it? The coding is so efficient because of the small processor and memory size that there wasn’t just any unused space lying around. It’s amazing they found bits and pieces of unused space they could use and that they could direct it to act as a unified block of memory.
Re FORTRAN, same with COBOL...
COBOL remains alive and well, despite its ageBy some estimates, 200,000 billion lines of code still exist. “If that 220 billion lines number is even close, then the replacement cost is probably between $4 and $8 trillion dollars today–maybe more,” he said. These tend to be large software systems and replacing them is risky, according to Kappelman.
“And there’s always the question of: Replace them with what? COBOL was invented largely to build systems to process transactions and generate reports,” which was one of the main types of processes getting computerized at that time, he said.
COBOL systems are also “quite structured and fairly maintainable,” Kappelman added. “Think of the back office systems of banks, brokerages, insurance and government organizations that are capable of processing massive amounts of transactions efficiently and quickly. It’s just overhead and there’s not really much, if any, strategic value in replacing them.”
“Not only is it pervasive, it’s not going anywhere,” observed Cameron Seay, an adjunct professor at East Carolina University in North Carolina, who teaches COBOL, and co-chairs the Open Mainframe Project’s COBOL Working Group.
This was a common occurrence in my day (cir 2000) using machine language coding, I suspect that Voyager has something similar.
What is amazing to me is that the code bursts are sent for 22 hours at light speed to reach the object, and must get loaded properly and not flip any bits. Wow!
That guy in the pink shirt looks very unhappy. Or maybe he’s overcome with emotion and is about to cry...
Except for that mask-wearing weenie in the doorway they all look normal.“
He even has a waist purse. He looks like he is “triggered”. The group at the table looks a group that can get the job done and it’s refreshing.
18 bit CPUs WTH 4096 bytes of plated wire no-volatile memory.
In 1967, as an architecture major at USC, I took a summer job--in my field--as a draftsman at the US Army Corps of Engineers/Military Design Section. At summer's end, precisely for the reasons you mentioned ("prehistoric technology, calcified bureaucracies, and crushingly stupid policies"), I swore to myself I would never work for the government again.
How does this make muslims feel good about themselves? The most important mission of NASA...
“third, and perhaps foremost, he wanted me to find a way to reach out to the Muslim world and engage much more with dominantly Muslim nations to help them feel good about their historic contribution to science, math and engineering.” -Charles Bolden, NASA Administrator
Question: What happens when V’Ger outlives the ground crew?
The guy in the mask is the political kommisar.
For every strep of any project there are reams of paper work to fill out. One can only fill out paperwork so long before moving on.
Each team member has the old guys that wrote the code and did the engineering, now living in assisted living housing, on speed dial.
I knew Charlie Bolden when he was an astronaut, before he became the head of the Astronaut Office, before he was the NASA Adninistrator and a politician, which comes with the title unfortunately. He was a very likeable person, as were most astronauts. Likeability is part of the job description.
Being an astronaut is a dream job. But its also essentially a political appointment. One gets to train and fly in space, more than once if you are lucky. But its definitely also a PR job and you have to be good at people and helping sell the program. Unfortunately the higher up on the chain you are, the closer you are to the politicians you really work for.
I dont know how Charlie Bolden felt about his muslim outreach assignment. However he felt about it, it was directed from the Obama White House.
Maybe you know this or maybe not: He flew more than 100 sorties into North and South Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia in the A-6A Intruder while assigned to VMA(AW)-533 at Royal Thai Air Base Nam Phong, Thailand, from June 1972 to June 1973.
So there might be more to the man than your quote above.
They could always program an AI to take care of any programming abnormalities................
send more chuck berry
There’s always one......................
That’s his happy face. And his sad face. And his excited face. And his depressed face. And ...
Only his wife knows how to read his face, and even she doesn’t always get it right.
“The guy in the mask is the political kommisar.”
Good one.
https://youtu.be/DVvOsQpGd3k?si=1OlOwEFOFpXsAREJ
Except for my Dad. He led the team that built the power plant, the “RTGs” which are the black things sticking out at the lower left in the pic. Dad passed a coupe decades ago.
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