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Voyager Set To Enter Interstellar Space

Posted by timothy on from the ok-but-you're-still-in-my-comfort-zone dept.

Phoghat writes "More than 30 years after they were launched, NASA's two Voyager probes have traveled to the edge of the solar system and are on the doorstep of interstellar space. Today, April 28, 2011, NASA held a live briefing to reflect on what the Voyager mission has accomplished — and to preview what lies ahead as the probes prepare to enter the realm of the Milky Way itself."

1 of 362 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Let me say by slew · · Score: 5, Informative

    How many times did they have to reboot Voyager?

    In case you didn't know, it wasn't a reboot, but there was a problem where they actually did have to live patch the voyager 2 computer last year for a bit-flip problem...

    Of course this was discussed previously

    Although that's impressive, in general, the SW architecture of voyager is quite complicated and fragile, and during the operation, several mistakes have been made one of which caused the primary receiver on Voyager 2 to be accidently shut down, never to work again (so it's relying on a backup which has a faultly frequency tuning circuit which they compensate in software).

    It's really only heroics which keep these probes up and running. The original engineering, while impressive, is really not the thing that's keeping things working now...