Voyager 1 starts making sense again after months of babble

[TexasTowelie]

Engineers are hopeful that the veteran spacecraft Voyager 1 might have turned a corner after spending the last three months spouting gibberish at controllers.…

On March 1, the Voyager team sent a command, dubbed a "poke," to get the probe's Flight Data System (FDS) to try some other sequences in its software in the hope of circumventing whatever had become corrupted.

Readers of a certain vintage will doubtless have memories of poke sheets for various 1980s games. Not that this hack ever used a poke to get infinite lives in Jet Set Willy, of course.

While Voyager 1's lifespan is not infinite, it has endured far longer than anticipated and might be about to dodge yet another bullet. On March 3, the mission team saw something different in the stream of data returned from the spacecraft, which had been unreadable since December.

Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/voyager-1-starts-making-sense-again-after-months-of-babble/ar-BB1jSZxL

[The Polack MSgt]

1. I hope the reset wasn't to rename it Veeger

[Hekate]

8. Oh, you

[edbermac]

2. Better angle here

[LastLiberal in PalmSprings]

4. These remind me of the Vanguard rocket.

They kept blowing up on the pad -- or just after liftoff. Ultimately, the Army had to step in to modify a Jupiter-C rocket to put the JPL-built Explorer satellite into orbit.

Launched in 1958, Explorer 1 remained in orbit until 1970.

[jmowreader]

3. I remember "poke sheets" from one computer I used in the Army

This had 60 terminals and a lot of other peripherals attached to it. We had to clear errors in the system by poking zeroes into specific memory locations.

The process you were SUPPOSED to use was to calculate the offset for the location you wanted to use, convert it from decimal to octal, then poke the octal into the address. Naturally, this took quite a while to do so our programmer and the four system operators decided to sit down and calculate out all the addresses then put them in a book for easy lookup. One fine day the main programmer for the system (there were two of them, we had one and the other was in a unit in West Germany) was in town when I had to do this. "Oh, you're so smart!" No, just persistent, and I showed her the book. "Can I make a copy of this? (The other unit) doesn't have anything like this!"

[calimary]

6. Nice!

[burrowowl]

5. K&R

Voyager just keeps going, wonderful.

[Cheezoholic]

7. I was more of a Leisure Suit Larry kinda guy ;) n/t