Reset of memory turns out to be just what the computer doctor ordered
Voyager 2 was launched 33 years ago and currently remains on course, traveling out of the solar system. It is currently 8.6 billion miles (13.8 billion km) from Earth, passing through the heliosphere, a magnetic bubble that surrounds our solar system. It continues to transmit data, even as it passes through this volatile region.
However, three weeks ago the probe started transmitting garbled messages to Earth. NASA program administrators put the spacecraft in an engineering mode, restricting it to only sending health updates to Earth, while they diagnosed the issue.
NASA’s Voyager 2 project manager Ed Massey comments, “In some spacecraft that are closer to the sun one could think of single event upsets caused by solar activity. But we’re so far away, it’s hard to say that’s what caused it. We’re like 93, 94 AU out.”
The command to reset the probe was set on May 19, and by May 22 the probe was back in action talking to Earth in its usual fashion.
h/t dbs mod
Voyager 2 was launched in 1977. Preceding the Time Magazine cover story The Cooling of America in 1979 but after the Time story Another Ice Age? in 1974 and Newsweek in 1975 with The Cooling World.
Stephen Skinner says:
June 12, 2010 at 4:45 pm
“It is extraordinary that in not much more than a hundred years we have gone from a short powered flight of 36 metres to sending space craft to every planet in our solar system and beyond to the boundary of outer space and our solar system….”
My grandfather rode in the last calvary charge of WWI, and his son my beloved uncle, who just passed away, as a boy would ploy the fields of their small European farm with buffalo.
It is the addition of the human element that truly shows how far we have come in such a short time.
Rich D.
Ian E says (June 13, 2010 at 1:55 am) : “Which can easily be proved by pointing out that we could be ‘living’ in a virtual reality with some glitches in the programming. QED”
“The Thirteenth Floor”, 1999. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0139809/