Saving Voyager 1! - Bruce Waggoner at !!Con 2024

Bruce Waggoner explains how NASA engineers diagnosed a memory failure on Voyager 1 and patched its flight software from billions of miles away.

Saving Voyager 1! Both of the 47 year old Voyager spacecraft are currently in interstellar space and returning their most important data set; in-situ measurements of the magnetic field, plasma and dust beyond the Heliopause. In late 2023, Voyager 1 lost all downlink telemetry and the flight team had essentially no visibility into the state of the spacecraft which is over 15 billion miles from the Earth. This talk will detail how the flight team diagnosed the problem, and formulated a recovery plan to patch the Flight Data System flight software. Bruce Waggoner is the Mission Assurance Manager at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab/Caltech. He graduated from the University of Nebraska with a BS in Physics and Astronomy. He has worked at JPL for 39 years supporting dozens of Earth orbiting and deep space missions. He also volunteers as a gymnastics coach and assists teaching girls engineering and science at a local high school. Presented at !!Con 2024 (pronounced, of course, "bangbangcon"!) in Santa Cruz, CA -- bangbangcon.com/ !!Con is a production of the Exclamation Foundation -- exclamation.foundation/