The ultimate in debugging

Engineers are currently debugging why the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which is 15 billions miles away, turned off its main radio and switched to a backup radio that hasn’t been used in over forty years!

I’ve had some tricky debugging issues in the past, including finding compiler bugs and debugging code with no debugger that had been burnt into prom packs for terminals, however I have huge admiration for the engineers maintaining the operation of Voyager 1.

Recently they sent a command to the craft that caused it to shut off its main radio transmitter, seemingly in an effort to preserve power and protect from faults. This prompted it to switch over to the backup radio transmitter, that is lower power.

Now they have regained communication they are trying to determine the cause on hardware that is nearly 50 years old. Any communication takes days.

When you think you have a difficult issue to debug, spare a thought for this team.

Links

Voyager 1 shocks NASA by signaling with a radio last used in 1981