• NocturnalMorning@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    This legitimately made me sad when I heard they might lose this satellite. It’s the farthest humans have ever sent anything beyond Earth, and it might always be the case. The science data coming back from this is invaluable.

  • LaunchesKayaks@lemmy.world
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    5 months ago

    This makes me genuinely happy. Not much uplifting news actually uplifts me these days. This is one of the rare headlines that does.

    • nepenthes@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      That’s what I thought too, until I read

      The announcement that Voyager 1’s instruments were returning data again came two days after JPL announced the passing of Ed Stone, who served as Voyager’s project scientist from the mission’s inception in 1972 until 2022.

      And realized it was the ghost of Ed Stone.

  • Nighed@feddit.uk
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    5 months ago

    Respect to the computer scientist who sorted that out. That has got to be an extremely satisfying bug to fix.

    • tabris@lemmy.world
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      5 months ago

      As a software engineer, I’m still trying to figure out their build pipeline. That thing has got to be interesting.

      • stoly@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        No documentation, imagine! The original designers–dead. This person had to reverse engineer every aspect of that system, though I can’t imagine that it has more than, say, 64KB of RAM. Still an enormous amount of work but not like trying to figure out how an iPhone works without any documentation.

    • Scirocco@lemm.ee
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      5 months ago

      They figured out how to resolve it weeks ago.

      It has taken this long to implement the results, and to get usable data flowing again

      • mkwt@lemmy.world
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        5 months ago

        They’re basically rewriting the software, and if it goes horribly wrong, the probe will just stop talking forever. So no one was in a big rush to push this into production.

        • Scirocco@lemm.ee
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          2 months ago

          But, it worked!

          They have actually done it, the madlads

          (What’s the gender neutral equivalent of madlads?)