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

!!Con · 8K views · 2024-09-09 · 35:25

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Overview

Bruce Waggoner of the Voyager team describes how engineers diagnosed Voyager 1's 2023 loss of telemetry and patched its flight software from 15 billion miles away. The talk covers the spacecraft's architecture and the scarcity of old documentation.

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Recommended as an amazing blind-debugging story with deep detail on 1970s spacecraft computing.

Recommended by 4 HN people across 3 months · HN mentions 2024–2026

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What people said

tverbeure · 2024-09 · Strong recommendation

2 weeks ago, Bruce Wagoner from the Voyager program gave a talk at !!Con about how they recovered from the CMOS memory issue that they had a year ago. It’s basically blind debugging with a latency of 45 hours. The talk is amazing and goes through the computer architecture of the spacecraft as well as the challenges of dealing with something that is so old, with so documentation that has conflicting information or unreadable etc. [VIDEO]

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tverbeure · 2024-09 · Strong recommendation

When Voyager failed last year with a CMOS memory error, one of the big problems was that a bunch of low level information was gone or conflicting. For example, they sometimes had to guess assembler instructions because the code printouts were low quality photocopied pages. Or because there were handwritten comments or comments scratched out with pencil without any clue about why it was done. One saving grace was the fact that the architecture and the code space was simple enough so that they could reason through the symptoms and actions to take, something that would have been much harder with modern spacecraft. Check out this amazing talk: [VIDEO]

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asalahli · 2025-02 · Recommendation

You might like this and or find it inspiring, in case you haven't seen it already: Saving Voyager 1! - Bruce Waggoner at !!Con 2024 - [VIDEO] Edit: Also, please do share when it's playable :)

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Video by !!Con, played through YouTube.

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