Voyager 2 has been 'repaired', from 11.5 billion miles away...

[JohnRBaker]

This is an amazing story, NASA uploaded a 'patch' to Voyager 2, which is 11.5 billion miles away. What's more amazing is that the people who designed Voyager 2, over 43 years ago, did so in a way that provided an environment which allowed for remote diagnosis and reprogramming by engineers 43 years in the future.

Note that I worked over 35 years with a software product that never left the ground and even then it was non-trivial to provide a scheme which allowed us to 'patch' our customer's systems.

NASA brings Voyager 2 fully back online, 11.5 billion miles from Earth

https://www.inverse.com/science/nas...lly-back-online-11.5-billion-miles-from-earth

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
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[EdStainless]

To be able to remotely patch and manage a system with a 34 hr delay and nil for a power budget is really tough.
We once had to reboot and run a system that was in SE Asia via dial-up modem. That was hard enough.

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P.E. Metallurgy

 

[IRstuff]

True, but not to take away from the accomplishment, many aerospace systems have excess capacity and remote re-programming capability requirements in the procurement specification. I would not doubt that Voyager would have had such requirements, given that it was originally a multiyear mission that slowly morphed into a multidecade mission.

I would point out that there are lots of software packages that tend to be fairly robust when it comes to updates to the main program or to accessory packages. ImageJ, which is open-source, and its pseudo-fork Fiji, are able to update relatively reliably and semi-automatically, simply requiring the user to click the OK button to start the upgrade. In itself, that's pretty amazing, given that there are hundreds of accessory processing modules that share and operate within the same overall program framework.

Of course, one advantage that Voyager shares with the iPhone is that only one entity can make changes to the operating system, which makes for a much more robust operation, unlike the PC, which allows much more freedom, and therefore invites more possibilities for conflicts.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

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[EdStainless]

Pretty impressive hardware

https://www.allaboutcircuits.com/ne...sary-computers-command-data-attitude-control/

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P.E. Metallurgy

 

[IRstuff]

At least, they went away from magnetic core memories, which were used on the original Space Shuttles to ensure that the data wouldn't get corrupted by radiation.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

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[JohnRBaker]

The first computer that I actually used to do work (as opposed to when I was in school) was a Data General S200 and it had magnetic-core memory, 8K per board (19 inch rack mounted). It took one full bay of the computer cabinet just for memory, 16 boards X 8K = 128K. We eventually upgraded the machine to CMOS memory that only required TWO memory boards at 128K each for a total of 256K. The improvement in performance was so great that we thought we had died and gone to heaven ;-)

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without

 

[IRstuff]

At one company, our CFO got the first 386 PC in the division and felt likewise, because his financial sheet now ran in 5 minutes when it took over 30 minutes to run on the 286. About a month later, he was complaining that the spreadsheet was taking over 30 minutes, but he had added a boatload of additional calculations.

TTFN (ta ta for now)
I can do absolutely anything. I'm an expert!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BKorP55Aqvg

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[JohnRBaker]

Yes, like nature abhorring a vacuum, programmers tend to abhor unused machine cycles or empty memory registers. I worked nearly 40 years using computers for one basic task, CAD, and as the hardware and software improved, all it did was allow us to tackle bigger and bigger problems. We got to the point where there was an accepted level of interactive 'performance' and as long as it stayed at this acceptable level, we would just keep pushing the system creating bigger and more complex models.

John R. Baker, P.E. (ret)
EX-Product 'Evangelist'
Irvine, CA
Siemens PLM:
UG/NX Museum:

The secret of life is not finding someone to live with
It's finding someone you can't live without