Voyager 2 fixed

NASA Fixes Bug On Voyager 2

by Staff Writers
Moscow, Russia (RIA Novosti) May 25, 2010

NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft has resumed sending science data from deep space after engineers fixed a bug that had garbled the information it was sending back to Earth, a leading project scientist said on Monday.
"The science data format is working," Edward Stone told RIA Novosti.

The science data coming from Voyager 2 had been unintelligible since April, but last week engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California figured out what was causing the problem - one bit in the memory of the computer that formats the data to transmit it to Earth had flipped from a zero to a one - and reset the system.

After three days of monitoring the engineering data to ensure the fix was successful, the command to restart science data transmission was sent to the spacecraft on Saturday. It takes nearly 13 hours for a radio signal traveling at the speed of light to reach the spacecraft from Earth, and another 13 hours to receive an answer, so scientists began receiving the science data on Sunday.

However, the data gathered while the system was not working has been lost.

more
http://www.space-travel.com/reports/NASA_Fixes_Bug_On_Voyager_2_999.html

Only about 27,000,000,000,000 miles to the 2nd nearest star. :)

They do things a heck of a lot better than the private sector BP.

I am completely amazed that my iPod has more processing power than the computer aboard Voyager. This remains one of the greatest feats of human achievement.

Voyager, not the iPod.

Damn. :wow:

Type message - send message - go home and get some sleep - come back to work and get response.

Congratulations to the folks at NASA. Excellent planning, engineering and execution!!! Very impressive recovery.