V'Ger is back

[Dark Lightning]

"Cabbages and Kings", and all that.

Cabbages. They are all green and nasty, but they are also round and lumpy-like-looking.

The Asmo hereby proclaims Himself-self to be the King of all Cabbagefolk.

Shred it, ferment it, put it on sausages. Cabbage goood! 

[Asmodean]

  The Asmo shall protect!

...Ah, who is He kidding? He eats his subjects.

[Recusant]

Recalling the post that revived this thread, once again . . .

"Voyager 1 Is Back! Legendary Probe Makes Contact From Interstellar Space" | Science Alert

A friendly voice we've been longing to hear is drifting back to us from interstellar space, 24 billion kilometers away (15 billion miles).

Voyager 1 – the most distant human-made object to Earth – is, once again, sounding like itself on the deep space radio network, after half a year of spewing gobbledegook.

Scientists at NASA are elated.

"We're back, baby!" reads an X post from NASA on June 15.

"Our Voyager 1 spacecraft is conducting normal science operations for the first time since November 2023. All four instruments – which study plasma waves, magnetic fields, and particles – are returning usable science data."

[Continues . . .]

[Tank]

 

[Icarus]

 

[Dark Lightning]

It's pretty amazing what the people who designed that thing did with a 16-bit processor and 70kB of memory. It uses Assembler and FORTRAN. I haven't used Assembler, but I've written thousands of lines of FORTRAN code in the past.

[Tank]

I did Z80 assembler for a set of scales once

[Recusant]

Thrusters back online, it seems. Should help us keep in touch for a while longer.

"NASA's Voyager 1 Revives Backup Thrusters Before Command Pause" | JPL

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California have revived a set of thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft that had been considered inoperable since 2004. Fixing the thrusters required creativity and risk, but the team wants to have them available as a backup to a set of active thrusters whose fuel tubes are experiencing a buildup of residue that could cause them to stop working as early as this fall.

In addition, the mission needed to ensure the availability of the long-dormant thrusters before May 4, when the Earth-bound antenna that sends commands to Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 went offline for months of upgrades.

[Continues, with discussion of fuel residue and thruster systems . . .]