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Voyager 1 Once Again Returning Science Data From All Four Instruments (hackaday.com)

submitted 5 months ago by FlyingSquid@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world

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[–] gedaliyah@lemmy.world 99 points 5 months ago (47 children)

It is just incredible to me that we have the ability and knowhow to send instructions to a 40 year old transistor computer to reprogram itself and get it working again with just radio signals.

[–] FlyingSquid@lemmy.world 85 points 5 months ago (37 children)

What they did was close to wizardry.

With no way to fix the chip, the team instead split the code up so it could be stored elsewhere. Initially they focused on reacquiring the engineering data, sending an update to Voyager 1 on 18 April 2024.

It takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to travel the 24 billion kilometres (15 billion miles) out to Voyager 1, and the same back, meaning the spacecraft’s operations team didn’t receive a message back until 20 April.

But when it arrived, they had usable data from Voyager 1 for the first time in five months.

https://www.skyatnightmagazine.com/space-missions/how-fixed-voyager-1

[–] Wogi@lemmy.world 20 points 5 months ago (36 children)

Here's a fun fact that I think of every time I read about light delay.

We assume the speed of light is the same in all directions but there's no way to prove that it is.

It could be light speed is instantaneous in one direction, and half the speed we think it is in the reverse. Any test we could devise depends on information traveling in two directions, nullifying any discrepancies in light speed.

[–] vithigar@lemmy.ca 6 points 5 months ago (1 children)

Another interesting way to conceptualize it is that the speed of light is infinite and it's causality/information that is limited to c. You shine a light at the moon and it takes 1.3 seconds for the "fact" that the light was turned on to propagate that far.

[–] Wogi@lemmy.world 3 points 5 months ago

Cixin Liu imagines exactly that towards the end of the Three Body series. Among other things, which make the series worth absolutely slogging through at points.

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