Success! JPL announced yesterday that engineering data was successfully received from the Voyager 1 spacecraft on Saturday April 20, the first time since Nov 2023.
We wrote about the problem with Voyager 1 in this chess diary on March 19 — www.dailykos.com/…. Its transmission had been stuck with sending a 0101... pattern since Nov 14, 2023.
Since then, NASA has been busy trying to relocate code around the failed memory area in the Flight Data System (FDS) computer. A new set of commands were sent on Thursday and as expected that fixed the problem.
Only engineering data (spacecraft health data) is being received. Successful reception of science data (data from its instruments) will require additional code relocation in the tight sparse free memory areas in the FDS. www.jpl.nasa.gov/…
Voyager 1 was launched on Sept 5, 1977, has been traveling in space for over 46 years and is now 24.3 billion km (22.5 light hours) away from earth.
There were cheers and applause at JPL as the data was received on Saturday.
Check out this diary for more details — Voyager 1 calls home!
Now let’s find the solution to today’s puzzle composed in 1977 (!) by noted Dutch chess composer and Grandmaster Jacobus Haring (1913 - 1989).
P.S.
The chess puzzle is published on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6:00 p.m. ET.
It is customary for advanced players to wait till midnight ET before posting the full solution. Before then, they provide some stats about the solution (e.g., the minimum number of distinct checkmate moves), help guide others, and sometimes post hints. But there are no hard-and-fast rules; feel free to post comments as you please.