an engineer with the agency’s Deep Space Network, which operates the radio antennas that communicate with both Voyagers and other spacecraft traveling to the Moon and beyond, was able to decode the new signal and found that it contains a readout of the entire FDS memory
oh, to be part of the core team of engineers for this - decoding ancient schematics and code, your entire focus on keeping this project alive. absolutely legendary stuff.
What’s really cool is they wanted to inspect the FDS to see if any parts of it is corrupted, and it was sending a whole damned readout back to us the entire time. No one could figure that out until now though.
Right! I wonder how did the probe send an entire memory dump back without them realizing. Was it programmed to do that when a system failed or something?
That person who enabled the debug flag on their last command is shitting their pants at the moment
It said that they’re comparing the memory from this signal to the memory banks when it was in a known-good state and that it would take (possibly) months. And I wondered why they couldn’t diff it. But as I’m typing, they probably need to account for measurements and data collected in between as opposed to just resetting something to the previous state.
Flip those bits, NASA. I’m hopeful.
I’ve got an Apple II+ that was doing weird shit. Turns out after a lot of sleuthing that it was a single bad DRAM chip, which due to the way that system handles RAM would show up as single unpredictable bits in various locations.
NASA, seek me out if y’all get stuck.
