The science data coming from Voyager 2 had been unintelligible since April, but last week engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California figured out what was causing the problem – one bit in the memory of the computer that formats the data to transmit it to Earth had flipped from a zero to a one – and reset the system.
After three days of monitoring the engineering data to ensure the fix was successful, the command to restart science data transmission was sent to the spacecraft on Saturday.
It takes nearly 13 hours for a radio signal traveling at the speed of light to reach the spacecraft from Earth, and another 13 hours to receive an answer, so scientists began receiving the science data on Sunday.
And I thought that communicating with borked ultrasonic industrial pipeline inspection equipment several miles below the ocean surface was challenging!
Or administering a server in the US via SSH from Thailand, was frustrating!
But seriously. Respect.
It must have been nail-biting for the 26 hours that engineers had to wait and see if their fix had worked.