SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
from the you're-throwing-a-kink-in-my-telemetry dept.
The engineering team with NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is trying to solve a mystery: The interstellar explorer is operating normally, receiving and executing commands from Earth, along with gathering and returning science data. But readouts from the probe's attitude articulation and control system (AACS) don't reflect what's actually happening onboard.
The AACS controls the 45-year-old spacecraft's orientation. Among other tasks, it keeps Voyager 1's high-gain antenna pointed precisely at Earth, enabling it to send data home. All signs suggest the AACS is still working, but the telemetry data it's returning is invalid. For instance, the data may appear to be randomly generated, or does not reflect any possible state the AACS could be in.
[...] It's possible the team may not find the source of the anomaly and will instead adapt to it, Dodd said. If they do find the source, they may be able to solve the issue through software changes or potentially by using one of the spacecraft's redundant hardware systems.
At only 160 baud, I bet it takes quite a while to update the onboard software on NASA Patch Tuesdays.
(Score: 2) by Snotnose on Monday May 23 2022, @08:20PM (6 children)
But can't you just unplug it, wait 20 seconds, and plug it back in?
I don't understand the issue here.
Somewhere in America a little girl is hiding in an attic writing about ICE.
(Score: 1, Touché) by Anonymous Coward on Monday May 23 2022, @09:25PM (3 children)
If they unplug it, it will cool down to 0.0001 Kelvin. Then all conductors become superconductors, resistors stop resisting, capacitors have no capacity, transistors stop transisting, transformers stop transforming, diodes become conductors, and you're done.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Immerman on Tuesday May 24 2022, @12:56AM (2 children)
2.7K, not 0.0001K - The coldest you can passively reach in space is thermal equilibrium with the microwave background radiation. And Voyager is passing through a relatively dense particle field (by deep space standards) at high speed - that's going to heat things up further.
As for everything else... not so much. Most conductors won't become superconductors at ultra-low temperatures. Depending on capacitor design they can be almost completely unaffected by temperature. Etc.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2022, @05:06AM
Way to ruin the joke, party pooper.
(Score: 2) by PiMuNu on Tuesday May 24 2022, @02:12PM
However, at 2.7 K quite a few things become superconducting - Lead, Niobium, Mercury, etc
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_superconductors [wikipedia.org]
I always find it amazing how different things are when not on earth.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2022, @12:40AM
That would probably work, but the cost of sending a service tech...
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Tuesday May 24 2022, @04:34AM
Just tell their sysadmin that it will hurt their uptime somehow. They'll find a way to fix the problem, muttering to themselves the whole time about how they have to do everything.