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Finally, engineers have a clue that could help them save Voyager 1 (arstechnica.com)

submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 41 points 8 months ago (13 children)

an engineer with the agency’s Deep Space Network, which operates the radio antennas that communicate with both Voyagers and other spacecraft traveling to the Moon and beyond, was able to decode the new signal and found that it contains a readout of the entire FDS memory

[–] [email protected] 29 points 8 months ago (11 children)

What's really cool is they wanted to inspect the FDS to see if any parts of it is corrupted, and it was sending a whole damned readout back to us the entire time. No one could figure that out until now though.

[–] [email protected] 18 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (10 children)

Right! I wonder how did the probe send an entire memory dump back without them realizing. Was it programmed to do that when a system failed or something?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 8 months ago

There's a little bit more context (although not a lot) at the NASA blog which seems to be the source for this article. Basically it looks like they instructed it to go to different memory addresses and run whatever code was there in order to try to bypass any corrupted sections. One result was this memory dump. The reason they didn't immediately identify it was that it wasn't properly formatted in the normal way.

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