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Engineers Pinpoint Cause of Voyager 1 Issue, Are Working on Solution
Said single chip holds 256 16-bit words of memory, out of the vast 8k in that FDS. (The Voyagers each have two FDSs, but the other one on Voyager 1 failed in the 1980s.)
High geekery: had the engineers asked for a memory dump of Voyager 1's main computers, it would have been a literal core dump, since the machines are old enough to have actual magnetic-core memories.
Anyway, I expect the clever folks at JPL will manage to get V1 more working again soonish.
Engineers have confirmed that a small portion of corrupted memory in one of the computers aboard NASA’s Voyager 1 has been causing the spacecraft to send unreadable science and engineering data to Earth since last November. Called the flight data subsystem (FDS), the computer is responsible for packaging the probe’s science and engineering data before [they're radioed back to Earth].
[...]Using [a core dump], the team has confirmed that about 3% of the FDS memory has been corrupted, preventing the computer from carrying out normal operations.
The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn’t working.[...]
Said single chip holds 256 16-bit words of memory, out of the vast 8k in that FDS. (The Voyagers each have two FDSs, but the other one on Voyager 1 failed in the 1980s.)
High geekery: had the engineers asked for a memory dump of Voyager 1's main computers, it would have been a literal core dump, since the machines are old enough to have actual magnetic-core memories.
Anyway, I expect the clever folks at JPL will manage to get V1 more working again soonish.
