Debugging Voyager 1, 22.5 hours at speed of light one-way comms

From the «cool as hell» department:
Feed: Ars Technica - All content
Title: Finally, engineers have a clue that could help them save Voyager 1
Author: Stephen Clark
Date: Fri, 15 Mar 2024 19:23:49 -0400
Link: https://arstechnica.com/?p=2010713

[image 1]

Enlarge[2] / Artist's illustration of the Voyager 1 spacecraft. (credit:
Caltech/NASA-JPL)

It's been four months since NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft sent an intelligible
signal back to Earth, and the problem has puzzled engineers tasked with
supervising the probe exploring interstellar space.

But there's a renewed optimism among the Voyager ground team based at NASA's Jet
Propulsion Laboratory in California. On March 1, engineers sent a command up to
Voyager 1—more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away from Earth—to
"gently prompt" one of the spacecraft's computers to try different sequences in
its software package. This was the latest step in NASA's long-distance
troubleshooting to try to isolate the cause of the problem preventing Voyager 1
from transmitting coherent telemetry data.

Cracking the case

Officials suspect a piece of corrupted memory inside the Flight Data Subsystem
(FDS), one of three main computers on the spacecraft, is the most likely culprit
for the interruption in normal communication. Because Voyager 1 is so far away,
it takes about 45 hours for engineers on the ground to know how the spacecraft
reacted to their commands—the one-way light travel time is about 22.5 hours.

Read 9 remaining paragraphs[3] | Comments[4]

Links:
[1]: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/voyager1art-800x450.jpg (image)
[2]: https://cdn.arstechnica.net/wp-content/uploads/2024/03/voyager1art.jpg (link)
[3]: https://arstechnica.com/?p=2010713#p3 (link)
[4]: https://arstechnica.com/?p=2010713comments=1 (link)