Houston We Have a Problem -- JPL Engineers Diagnosing Voyager 2 at the Edge of the Solar System
Engineers are diagnosing an unexpected change in the pattern of returning data from the Voyager 2. The spacecraft is now at the edge of the heliosphere, about 8.6 billion miles from Earth. Preliminary engineering data received on May 1, 2010 showed that the spacecraft is basically healthy, and that the source of the issue is an on-board system responsible for formatting data to send back to Earth. It takes nearly 13 hours for signals from Earth, travelling at the speed of light, to reach the spacecraft and 13 hours for signals to return to Earth. Originally designed for a 4 year mission to Saturn, Voyager 2 is still returning data 33 years later.
Comments:
Wish my car would so so well. :S
<blockquote class="blockquote"><div class="italic"><i>Donald Allen said:</i><br><br>Wish my car would so so well. :S </div></blockquote><br>If your car cost 400+ million dollars, it probably would. 8O
<br>Updated May 24, 2010 at 5:30 p.m. PDT <br><br>Engineers successfully reset a computer onboard Voyager 2 that caused an unexpected data pattern shift, and the spacecraft resumed sending properly formatted science data back to Earth on Sunday, May 23. Mission managers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif., had been operating the spacecraft in engineering mode since May 6. They took this action as they traced the source of the pattern shift to the flip of a single bit in the flight data system computer that packages data to transmit back to Earth. In the next week, engineers will be checking the science data with Voyager team scientists to make sure instruments onboard the spacecraft are processing data correctly. <br>
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