Comparison:
So they poked it. They sent commands to Voyager 1, trying to jolt it back to coherence. The [tiger] team had a list of potential failures and figured that one of the commands might have the equivalent effect of kicking a vending machine.
Joel Achenbach helps us understand the rigor, difficulty, and challenge of a JPL Tiger Team repairing out-of-date code and rebooting a valiant 1970s exploratory spacecraft from a distance of 15 Billion (that BILLION with a “B“) miles. Bet you've never kicked a vending machine from that distance!
Context:
After initial attempts to resolve the issue went nowhere, JPL leadership created a ‘tiger team‘ made of a multigenerational crew of engineers, some of them veterans of the lab and some born long after the Voyagers launched.
‘We didn’t know how to solve this in the beginning because we didn’t know what’s wrong,‘ said Mellstrom, the team’s leader.
. . .
‘We didn’t know what part of the spacecraft was involved with this,‘ Dodd said.
So they poked it. They sent commands to Voyager 1, trying to jolt it back to coherence. The team had a list of potential failures and figured that one of the commands might have the equivalent effect of kicking a vending machine.
Citation:
Achenbach, Joel. “Voyager 1 was in crisis in interstellar space. NASA wouldn’t give up.“ Washington Post, 10 May 2024. Web.
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