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The Planetary Society Blog

By Emily Lakdawalla

Voyager 2's flipped bit fixed

May. 21, 2010 | 15:12 PDT | 22:12 UTC

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A happy ending to this story: JPL reported yesterday evening that the flipped bit in Voyager 2's flight data system software has been successfully toggled back to its correct value.

Reset commands were beamed up to the spacecraft yesterday, Wed., May 19, and engineering data received today confirm that the reset was successful. The Voyager team will continue monitoring the engineering data, and if the bit remains reset, commands to switch to the science data mode will be beamed up to Voyager 2 on Sat., May 22. Receipt of science data would then resume on Sun., May 23.

Yay for the Voyager 2 mission team!

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Comments

Awesome! It was exciting to follow their progress from diagnosis to treatment. The triumph of human engineering is readily evident in their ability to fix problems like these. Keep in mind, this will be a noted event in the science books centuries written from now.

#1 - Kirk Horton - 05/21/2010 - 16:52

written centuries*
lysdexia?

#2 - Kirk Horton - 05/21/2010 - 16:53

Even an old probe can make a back flip, it seems. Nice!

#3 - Torbjörn Larsson, OM - 05/21/2010 - 18:03

And a Yay for Canberra DSN! They always get forgotten.....

I dont think it was quite as simple as the JPL story implies. It looked to me like Voyagers FDS computer was fully reloaded which would have taken several hours of perfect tracking by Canberra.

#4 - Bernard - 05/24/2010 - 13:06


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