Engineers finally received a status update from the most distant spacecraft from Earth, after identifying the cause of the aging probe’s five-month communication issue.
Incredible! So the memory chip holding a lot of core programming was damaged or failed, so they figured out which chip it was, but then there was no single place large enough to store this vital code, so they divided it up and distributed it throughout the remaining memory and now it works.
I really struggle to comprehend how you can debug hardware that is several light-hours away, let alone how you would proceed to split an OS (or whatever Voyager is running) into separate parts and then upload those parts to separate hunks of memory to make a functioning machine…
Also: What would they do if the code they uploaded was corrupted “in transmission”?
For most transmissions of digital information (even those here on earth) there’s a concept of a “checksum”. Basically at the end of every message, there’s a special number, and you can do some math on the rest of the message to get that same number. If anything happened to change or damage the message in transit, the math doesn’t work out and so the checksum fails.
I would assume Voyager works in a similar way so every time it receives a message it will compute the checksum and see whether it matches
Incredible! So the memory chip holding a lot of core programming was damaged or failed, so they figured out which chip it was, but then there was no single place large enough to store this vital code, so they divided it up and distributed it throughout the remaining memory and now it works.
These people are brilliant.
I really struggle to comprehend how you can debug hardware that is several light-hours away, let alone how you would proceed to split an OS (or whatever Voyager is running) into separate parts and then upload those parts to separate hunks of memory to make a functioning machine…
Also: What would they do if the code they uploaded was corrupted “in transmission”?
For most transmissions of digital information (even those here on earth) there’s a concept of a “checksum”. Basically at the end of every message, there’s a special number, and you can do some math on the rest of the message to get that same number. If anything happened to change or damage the message in transit, the math doesn’t work out and so the checksum fails.
I would assume Voyager works in a similar way so every time it receives a message it will compute the checksum and see whether it matches
But how does plated-wire memory (core memory variant) fail with age and no mechanical damage? Or is it mechanical damage, vibrations?
Edit: or radiation exposure?
It’s the void dude
Radiation damage and electrical components degrade by using them.
Maybe the ferromagnetic layer got brittle?