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we knew it could! we knew it could!
Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Science Data from Two Instruments
the two instruments being the magnetometer and the plasma wave subsystem. the two particle instruments, the cosmic ray instrument and the low-energy particle instrument, are still offline.
my semi-informed guess is that the voyager team started with the lowest-bandwidth instruments: the plasma wave dealie generates only 32 bits/second, and the magnetometer gathers 120 bits/second. the particle detectors' description makes it sound like they produce particle spectra (lists of how many particles and what energies they had) which could be a lot of data, relatively speaking.
the two instruments being the magnetometer and the plasma wave subsystem. the two particle instruments, the cosmic ray instrument and the low-energy particle instrument, are still offline.
my semi-informed guess is that the voyager team started with the lowest-bandwidth instruments: the plasma wave dealie generates only 32 bits/second, and the magnetometer gathers 120 bits/second. the particle detectors' description makes it sound like they produce particle spectra (lists of how many particles and what energies they had) which could be a lot of data, relatively speaking.