riveron Lobsters • Recommends
How We Diagnosed and Fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 Anomaly from 15 Billion Miles Away
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How We Diagnosed and Fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 Anomaly from 15 Billion Miles Away
Flight Software Workshop
3.2K subscribers • 1 video on Hallway
- Recommended by 3 people: 2 on Hacker News and 1 on Lobsters.
- Presented by David Cummings
Advanced. Deep dive for people who know the field.
17K views1 year ago3 recommendations
Systems programmingTools and practiceEmbedded systemsDebugging
David Cummings explains how the JPL team diagnosed and patched a memory corruption issue on Voyager 1's legacy flight computer.
David Cummings (JPL) presents "How We Diagnosed and Fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 Anomaly from 15 Billion Miles Away" for FSW Workshop 2025 hosted by Stoke Space at UW Seattle, WA, March 2025.Why it's here
3 people recommend thisWhat people say. Highly recommended as an incredible real-world debugging story of reverse engineering and patching 50-year-old software in deep space.
wanderingmindon Hacker News • Recommends
On “NASA to keep its 48-year-old Voyager 2 probe running for yet another year”
A slight tangent here is a technical deep dive on Voyager 1 fixing a memory corruption error in 2023 by hand 15 billion miles away. Blows my mind of the reverse engineering done to achieve this link to this video
ndiddyon Hacker News • Recommends
On “NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating”
Here's a talk about how the Voyager team fixed the flight data computer on Voyager 1 when a memory chip went bad on it a few years ago. It goes over how the flight computer works and he walks through a few assembly routines. link to this video Some of the challenges they had to deal with while developing the fix: - The only source code they had for the flight data software was an OCR'd Microsoft Word document (with typos) that was likely scanned from a hard copy assembler listing printout. - The processor runs a custom instruction set developed by JPL for the Voyager mission. The documentation they had on the processor was incomplete. - Everybody who had designed the flight software was dead. - They ha…
zerdon Hacker News • Mentions
On “Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder”
Based on the communication fix, they also didn't have a simulator, or tests, or complete source code, on a custom instruction set that wasn't well documented, so they had to reverse engineer how it worked. link to this video