The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.

So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.

Source: https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/news/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth

[–] blarth@thelemmy.club 20 points 1 year ago (1 children)

NASA engineers, man.

[–] nilloc@discuss.tchncs.de 5 points 1 year ago

It interesting that the memory is so discrete that it can be reprogrammed when a single ROM fails. And it’s really neat that they made the whole thing accessible to a radio controlled boot loader. The planning that went into building and maintaining Voyager is really incredible.

I wonder if we could still build one as robust these days?

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