• FlatFootFox@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    10 months ago

    I still cannot believe NASA managed to re-establish a connection with Voyager 1.

    That scene from The Martian where JPL had a hardware copy of Pathfinder on Earth? That’s not apocryphal. NASA keeps a lot of engineering models around for a variety of purposes including this sort of hardware troubleshooting.

    It’s a practice they started after Voyager. They shot that patch off into space based off of old documentation, blueprints, and internal memos.

    • nxdefiant@startrek.website
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      10 months ago

      Imagine scrolling back in the Slack chat 50 years to find that one thing someone said about how the chip bypass worked.

    • ricecake@sh.itjust.works
      link
      fedilink
      English
      arrow-up
      1
      ·
      10 months ago

      To add to the metal, the blueprints include the blueprints for the processor.

      https://hackaday.com/2024/05/06/the-computers-of-voyager/

      They don’t use a microprocessor like anything today would, but a pile of chips that provide things like logic gates and counters. A grown up version of https://gigatron.io/

      That means “written in assembly” means “written in a bespoke assembly dialect that we maybe didn’t document very well, or the hardware it ran on, which was also bespoke”.