Originally published at: https://boingboing.net/2024/04/22/voyager-1s-incredible-journey-continues-after-nasa-patches-code-in-46-year-old-chip-from-a-distance-of-15-billion-miles.html
…
31 Likes
46 Likes
34 Likes
And the pastries look good, too.
17 Likes
(and i can’t even manage to flash new firmware on a laptop right in front of me)
These guys are @#$! amazing!
51 Likes
21 Likes
Does it require a password or anyone with a powerful antenna can modify the source code?
If isn’t there already a xkcd comic about it, i can imagine it being posted because of this.
It is amazing how it has almost 50 years and still can be fixed.
And, despite traveling so much (almost a light-day), it is still nothing compared to the universe size.
17 Likes
Fucking epic! Science for the win!
29 Likes
Yes, that’s true, yet it’s the furthest travelling thing the humans have sent out and done with technology that wouldn’t power a vending machine in the modern world.
20 Likes
Truly astonishing. I am so happy for these people.
16 Likes
Amazing work!
This has to be some kind of record for how long a user was stuck on the phone with tech support.
29 Likes
I’m always impressed with the fixes that can be done from afar. This is quite a bit more challenging than the 2003 story of the twin Mars rovers losing use of their filesystems after filling them with telemetry data on the journey, with the Earth-bound operator having to ‘press any key within 7 seconds’ to drop into the VxWorks debug console prompt.
24 Likes
And some complain about patch Tuesday.
14 Likes
Those are big antennas.
Hacking earth satellites would be more interesting.
23 Likes
I assume they tried this out on a local test system (or simulation/VM) first before attempting to deploy and waiting 40+ hours to have a better understanding if it had a chance of working?
Not trying to minimize the achievement, but trying to understand their troubleshooting process and tools.
13 Likes
It’s unbelievable this is possible - and yet they did it! There’s a nice piece about Voyager’s computers at:
20 Likes
they hypothesized that the problem was failing memory, and i’m sure they could have tested a fix for that issue here on earth. but, they really had no way of knowing for sure whether the hypothesis itself was correct until the workaround was applied.
the only exact system is the system itself
24 Likes
My understanding is that the NRO was put in charge of spacecraft communications security long ago, far back before their existence was declassified. I read that the NASA engineers were given a chip to install between the radio and the onboard computer that would secure the communications from unauthorized parties, and they were given no other details. An intermediary carried any technical questions from the NASA engineers to whoever provided the chip, and that was it.
However, I don’t have firsthand knowledge of this, or whether or not it was applied to the Voyager mission. And I can’t be bothered to go search my library for a citation. So take that all with the chemically appropriate dose of sodium chloride.
11 Likes
Presumably questions like “Is this simple and rugged enough to keep working for decades in deep space?”
4 Likes
The Voyager spacecraft computer systems were designed in the 1970s, when even hardware-based encryption was rare, and were built out of large numbers of simple logic ICs instead of using microprocessors. So this “chip to install between the radio and onboard computer” wasn’t a thing back then.
I’m pretty sure the main thing keeping just anyone from trying to patch the Voyager computers is having a very large high-gain dish antenna and a multi-kilowatt transmitter, and beyond that the relative obscurity of the computer architecture and communication protocols involved.
15 Likes
