Voyager 1 Starts Making Sense Again After Months of Babble
owl writes:
https://www.theregister.com/2024/03/14/voyager_1_not_dead/
Engineers are hopeful that the veteran spacecraft Voyager 1 might have turned a corner after spending the last three months spouting gibberish at controllers.
On March 1, the Voyager team sent a command, dubbed a "poke," to get the probe's Flight Data System (FDS) to try some other sequences in its software in the hope of circumventing whatever had become corrupted.
Readers of a certain vintage will doubtless have memories of poke sheets for various 1980s games. Not that this hack ever used a poke to get infinite lives in Jet Set Willy, of course.
While Voyager 1's lifespan is not infinite, it has endured far longer than anticipated and might be about to dodge yet another bullet. On March 3, the mission team saw something different in the stream of data returned from the spacecraft, which had been unreadable since December.
An engineer with the Deep Space Network (DSN) was able to decode it, and by March 10, the team determined that it contained a complete memory dump from the FDS.
[...] The next step is to study the memory read-out and compare it to one transmitted before the problem arose. A solution to the issue could then be devised.
One of the original Voyager scientists, Garry Hunt, told The Register that engineers at JPL were determined to get communications with the stricken probe working again: "This requires both skills and patience with the long time between communication instructions and response."
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