The probe Voyager 1in addition to being the farthest human machine from Earth – nearly 25 billion kilometers – has received a new honor since last month: downloading the software that has made the longest journey in the history of computer science.
This last episode started Last November: The American probe, which dates back to 1977, began sending unreadable data to Earth. The equivalent of computer code that would have been corrupt By virus.
busty?
The engineers concluded that what they had feared for years had finally happened: one of the three on-board computers responsible for navigation (Flight data subsystem), had reached the end of his life.
However, in early April, an analysis of this incomprehensible data revealed a pattern, raising the possibility that the code was only partially corrupted. If so, all you have to do is send the software update to Voyager 1which will command him to no longer observe the problematic part of his programming.
5 times farther than Pluto
It was easier said than done… At a distance of 25 billion kilometers, more than 5 times farther than Pluto, this “update” took 22 and a half hours to reach the planet’s tiny antenna. Voyager 1.
