JPL partially fixes Voyager 1

[Micael]

Sometimes I’m amazed at what kind of incredible fixes NASA can pull off, while at the same time regarding other projects the organization seems to be unable to get things done at all.

NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth
April 22, 2024
Voyager
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
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.
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 Full Image Details
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.

[Belushi TD]

Because the people working on the legacy stuff are fully aware of three things.

1. Their budget is STATIC. No way they're going to get more money to make something happen. There's NOTHING flashy about old space tech.

2. If their space stuff doesn't work for long enough, their budget will get SLASHED. And then there goes their cushy job.

3. They've been focused on legacy stuff for so long the time it will take to retrain them will be far longer and cost far more than the business majors running NASA are willing to allow, so they'll get laid off and have NO salable skills.

Belushi TD