voyager

26 Articles

2024: As The Hardware World Turns

January 2, 2025 by 21 Comments

With 2024 now officially in the history books, it’s time to take our traditional look back and reflect on some of the top trends and stories from the past twelve months as viewed from the unique perspective Hackaday affords us. Thanks to the constant stream of tips and updates we receive from the community, we’ve got a better than average view of what’s on the mind of hardware hackers, engineers, and hobbyists.

This symbiotic relationship is something we take great pride in, which is why we also use this time of year to remind the readers just how much we appreciate them. We know it sounds line a line, but we really couldn’t do it without you. So whether you’ve just started reading in 2024 or been with us for years, everyone here at Hackaday thanks you for being part of something special. We’re keenly aware of how fortunate we are to still be running a successful blog in the era of YouTube and TikTok, and that’s all because people like you keep coming back. If you keep reading it, we’ll keep writing it.

So let’s take a trip down memory lane and go over just a handful of the stories that kept us talking in 2024. Did we miss your favorite? Feel free to share with the class in the comments.

Continue reading “2024: As The Hardware World Turns” →

Voyager 1 Completes Tricky Thruster Reconfiguration

September 11, 2024 by 35 Comments

After 47 years it’s little wonder that the hydrazine-powered thrusters of the Voyager 1, used to orient the spacecraft in such a way that its 3.7 meter (12 foot) diameter antenna always points back towards Earth, are getting somewhat clogged up. As a result, the team has now switched back to the thrusters which they originally retired back in 2018. The Voyager spacecraft each have three sets (branches) of thrusters. Two sets were originally intended for attitude propulsion, and one for trajectory correction maneuvers, but since leaving the Solar System many years ago, Voyager 1’s navigational needs have become more basic, allowing all three sets to be used effectively interchangeably.

The first set was used until 2002, when clogging of the fuel tubes was detected with silicon dioxide from an aging rubber diaphragm in the fuel tank. The second set of attitude propulsion thrusters was subsequently used until 2018, until clogging caused the team to switch to the third and final set. It is this last set that is now more clogged then the second set, with the fuel tube opening reduced from about 0.25 mm to 0.035 mm. Unlike a few decades ago, the spacecraft is much colder due energy-conserving methods, complicating the switching of thruster sets. Switching on a cold thruster set could damage it, so it had to be warmed up first with its thruster heaters.

The conundrum was where to temporarily borrow power from, as turning off one of the science instruments might be enough to not have it come back online. Ultimately a main heater was turned off for an hour, allowing the thruster swap to take place and allowing Voyager 1 to breathe a bit more freely for now.

Compared to the recent scare involving Voyager 1 where we thought that its computer systems might have died, this matter probably feels more routine to the team in charge, but with a spacecraft that’s the furthest removed man-made spacecraft in outer space, nothing is ever truly routine.

Voyager 1 Once Again Returning Science Data From All Four Instruments

June 15, 2024 by 13 Comments

As humanity’s furthest reach into the Universe so far, the two Voyager spacecraft’s well-being is of utmost importance to many. Although we know that there will be an end to any science mission, the recent near-death experience by Voyager 1 was a shocking event for many. Now it seems that things may have more or less returned to normal, with all four remaining scientific instruments now back online and returning information.

Since the completion of Voyager 1’s primary mission over 43 years ago, five of its instruments (including the cameras) were disabled to cope with its diminishing power reserves, with two more instruments failing. This left the current magnetometer (MAG), charged particle (LECP) and cosmic ray (CRS) instruments, as well as the plasma wave subsystem (PWS). These are now all back in operation based on the returned science data after the Voyager team confirmed previously that they were receiving engineering data again.

With Voyager 1 now mostly back to normal, some housekeeping is necessary: resynchronizing the onboard time, as well as maintenance on the digital tape recorder. This will ensure that this venerable spacecraft will be all ready for its 47th anniversary this fall.

Thanks to [Mark Stevens] for the tip.

Institutional Memory, On Paper

May 11, 2024 by 18 Comments

Our own Dan Maloney has been on a Voyager kick for the past couple of years. Voyager, the space probe. As a long-term project, he has been trying to figure out the computer systems on board. He got far enough to write up a great overview piece, and it’s a pretty good summary of what we know these days. But along the way, he stumbled on a couple old documents that would answer a lot of questions.

Dan asked JPL if they had them, and the answer was “no”. Oddly enough, the very people who are involved in the epic save a couple weeks ago would also like a copy. So when Dan tracked the document down to a paper-only collection at Wichita State University, he thought he had won, but the whole box is stashed away as the library undergoes construction.

That box, and a couple of its neighbors, appear to have a treasure trove of documentation about the Voyagers, and it may even be one-of-a-kind. So in the comments, a number of people have volunteered to help the effort, but I think we’re all just going to have to wait until the library is open for business again. In this age of everything-online, everything-scanned-in, it’s amazing to believe that documents about the world’s furthest-flown space probe wouldn’t be available, but so it is!

It makes you wonder how many other similar documents – products of serious work by the people responsible for designing the systems and machines that shaped our world – are out there in the dark somewhere. History can’t capture everything, and it’s down to our collective good judgement in the end. So if you find yourself in a position to shed light on, or scan, such old papers, please do! And then contact some nerd institution like the Internet Archive or the Computer History Museum.

This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on the web version of the newsletter. Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning? You should sign up!

Welcome Back, Voyager

April 27, 2024 by 59 Comments

In what is probably the longest-distance tech support operation in history, the Voyager mission team succeeded in hacking their way around some defective memory and convincing their space probe to send sensor data back to earth again. And for the record, Voyager is a 46-year old system at a distance of now 24 billion kilometers, 22.5 light-hours, from the earth.

While the time delay that distance implies must have made for quite a tense couple days of waiting between sending the patch and finding out if it worked, the age of the computers onboard probably actually helped, in a strange way. Because the code is old-school machine language, one absolutely has to know all the memory addresses where each subroutine starts and ends. You don’t call a function like do_something(); but rather by loading an address in memory and jumping to it.

This means that the ground crew, in principle, knows where every instruction lives. If they also knew where all of the busted memory cells were, it would be a “simple” programming exercise to jump around the bad bits, and re-write all of the subroutine calls accordingly if larger chunks had to be moved. By “simple”, I of course mean “incredibly high stakes, and you’d better make sure you’ve got it right the first time.”

In a way, it’s a fantastic testament to simpler systems that they were able to patch their code around the memory holes. Think about trying to do this with a modern operating system that uses address space layout randomization, for instance. Of course, the purpose there is to make hacking directly on the memory harder, and that’s the opposite of what you’d want in a space probe.

Nonetheless, it’s a testament to careful work and clever software hacking that they managed to get Voyager back online. May she send for another 46 years!

This article is part of the Hackaday.com newsletter, delivered every seven days for each of the last 200+ weeks. It also includes our favorite articles from the last seven days that you can see on the web version of the newsletter. Want this type of article to hit your inbox every Friday morning? You should sign up!

NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates To Earth

April 22, 2024 by 29 Comments

After many tense months, it seems that thanks to a gaggle of brilliant engineering talent and a lucky break the Voyager 1 spacecraft is once more back in action. Confirmation came on April 20th, when Voyager 1 transmitted its first data since it fell silent on November 14 2023. As previously suspected, the issue was a defective memory chip in the flight data system (FDS), which among other things is responsible for preparing the data it receives from other systems before it is transmitted back to Earth. As at this point in time Voyager 1 is at an approximate 24 billion kilometers distance, this made for a few tense days for those involved.

The firmware patch that got sent over on April 18th contained an initial test to validate the theory, moving the code responsible for the engineering data packaging to a new spot in the FDS memory. If the theory was correct, this should mean that this time the correct data should be sent back from Voyager. Twice a 22.5 hour trip and change through Deep Space and back later on April 20th the team was ecstatic to see what they had hoped for.

With this initial test successful, the team can now move on to moving the remaining code away from the faulty memory after which regular science operations should resume, and giving the plucky spacecraft a new lease on life at the still tender age of 46.

Voyager 1 Issue Tracked Down To Defective Memory Chip

April 6, 2024 by 52 Comments

After more than forty-six years all of us are likely to feel the wear of time, and Voyager 1 is no different. Following months of harrowing troubleshooting as the far-flung spacecraft stopped returning sensible data, NASA engineers now feel confident that they have tracked down the cause for the problem: a single defective memory chip. Why this particular chip failed is unknown, but possibilities range from wear and tear to an energetic particle hitting it and disrupting its operation.

We’ve covered the Voyager 1 troubleshooting saga so far, with the initial garbled responses attributed to a range of systems, but narrowed down to the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), which prepares data for transmission by the telemetry modulation unit (TMU). Based on a recent ‘poke’ command that returned a memory dump engineers concluded that the approximately 3% of corrupted data fit with this one memory chip, opening the possibility of a workaround.

Recently NASA engineers have also been working on patching up the firmware in both Voyager spacecraft, against the background of the dwindling energy produced by the radioisotope generators that have kept both spacecraft powered and warm, even in the cold, dark depths of Deep Space far beyond the light of our Sun.