How We Diagnosed and Fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 Anomaly from 15 Billion Miles Away

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wanderingmind · 2026-08 · Strong recommendation

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 [VIDEO]

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ndiddy · 2026-04 · Recommendation

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. [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 had no assembler, no debugger, and no processor simulator. They had no testbed, the only two FDS processors were in space.

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zerd · 2026-03 · Reference

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. [VIDEO]

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