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NASA Finds Cause of Voyager 2 Glitch
astroengine writes "Earlier this month, engineers suspended Voyager 2's science measurements because of an unexpected problem in its communications stream. A glitch in the flight data system, which formats information for radioing to Earth, was believed to be the problem. Now NASA has found the cause of the issue: it was a single memory bit that had erroneously flipped from a 0 to a 1. The cause of the error is yet to be understood, but NASA plans to reset Voyager's memory tomorrow, clearing the error."
Nobody knows you've done anything at all.
-|BlackErtai|-
Why don't they just always try that first?
Let me guess: cosmic ray. Is it really that hard? What else causes a single bit-flip error in space?
When you have a probe billions of miles from Earth, with no hope of ever physically retrieving it, and something weird happens, I don't think the first thing you do is start making assumptions.
NASA is my hero. They do cool shit all the time. Even when their stuff breaks, it's cool. Then they fix it and it's even more cool.
No sig for you. YOU GET NO SIG!
It's pretty amazing that they even were able to track the problem down to a particular bit.
To be fair, Voyager doesn't have many bits in its memory :). Tracking down a bad bit is much easier when you have 4k of RAM than when you have 4GB of RAM.
1977 was a different time, when information technology usually didn't even involve transistors, yet, and vacuum tube testers (for your TV) were still found at the local drug store.
Tube testers were pretty darned hard to find almost anywhere in 1977 (you could find them in old-used-electronics stores). I do recall testing tubes in drugstores in the early 70's.
Solid state, and even (*gasp*) integrated circuits were in widespread use. Why, by gosh by golly, we even had *8080*'s then.
I was a senior in college in physics+EE; I and a handful of my fellow students managed to coerce one of the EE profs to take a few hours and teach us about tubes (they had been removed from the curriculum). For the most part the interest was for us audio-nerds... tubes had that nice desirable sweet sound... (but I digress)
Stupidity... has a habit of getting its way.
tubes had that nice desirable sweet distortion...
There, fixed that for ya...
Any sufficiently advanced intelligence is indistinguishable from stupidity.
One of the upgrades the Voyagers had over the Viking computers was CMOS memory (instead of plated wires). Read all about it at http://history.nasa.gov/computers/contents.html Apparently, there was some debate at the time over whether these new-fangled memories would be reliable.
1977 - when advanced microchips were not as powerful as the chip driving the shatty calculator you buy today at the dollar store.
Classic, ever repeated confusion of what "power" is. Unless you mean volts times amps, power is what you can do with it. An old mainframe can run a department of a small multinational corporation, maybe a large university, or perhaps a division of state government. We know this, because they did in fact do so, very profitably. You claim a dollar store calculator is more powerful. That means a dollar store calculator should be able to run, say, an entire multinational corporation, maybe multiple universities, or an entire state government. Oh wait, a dollar store calculator can, at best, slowly calculate someone's income tax, possibly correctly. I guess the old mainframe is more powerful after all.
When I worked at a mainframe shop in the late 90s I heard alot of similar tiresome comments... "Ha ha, mainframes, bet you didn't know my laptop can run NOPs faster than your mainframe can run floating point FFTs ha ha ha mainframes". At which point you simply tell them to put up or shut up, hand them a bus and tag cable, and have their infinitely "more powerful" laptop process 5% of the NYSE volume like our mainframes did, while supporting about 100K trader desks, a couple TB of tape robot storage, etc.
"Science flies us to the moon. Religion flies us into buildings." - Victor Stenger