NASA lost contact with the interstellar Voyager 1 spacecraft for nearly a week after a technical glitch shut off the probe's main transmitter. Using Voyager's weaker backup transmitter, engineers are assessing the problem from 15 billion miles away.
Although it doesn’t compare to modern systems, the computer systems on Voyager is a computer by all means. It’s even the longest running computer that ever existed, having never been shut off. It runs Fortran code.
The image data that the camera made didnn’t have to fit in the computers memory. It was written directly to tape, which was then transmitted by the computer. The resolution is 800x800 pixels with only one colour at a time. The colour images or in larger resolutions were combinations of several images. The camera has been shut off by now.
Speaking of not wanting to touch the code, it did have an issue last year, where the code seemed to have stopped or gone into a loop for unknown reasons making it inaccessible for the operators on Earth. Thankfully another part of the computer was instructed to periodically overwrite the main code, so it managed to correct the error by itself. At least that’s what I remember reading.
Although it doesn’t compare to modern systems, the computer systems on Voyager is a computer by all means. It’s even the longest running computer that ever existed, having never been shut off. It runs Fortran code.
The image data that the camera made didnn’t have to fit in the computers memory. It was written directly to tape, which was then transmitted by the computer. The resolution is 800x800 pixels with only one colour at a time. The colour images or in larger resolutions were combinations of several images. The camera has been shut off by now.
Speaking of not wanting to touch the code, it did have an issue last year, where the code seemed to have stopped or gone into a loop for unknown reasons making it inaccessible for the operators on Earth. Thankfully another part of the computer was instructed to periodically overwrite the main code, so it managed to correct the error by itself. At least that’s what I remember reading.