Space News thread

[cyrille]

I don't really get the big deal.

There was one when I was working in Bangkok.

We went outside, in front of the old BC building in Siam Square.

Birds got confused by the darkness.

We went back to work.

Now people build holiday itineraries around it, apparently.

[Takeovers]

Latest and best pic of the eclipse :

Just found out they are fakes. Claimed done by AI. I had wondered about them, then stumbled on an explanation. But sure lovely pictures, I made one my background for a while.

[Takeovers]

I don't really get the big deal.

There was one when I was working in Bangkok.

Maybe it was the City surrounding. Most people find them very exciting.

[cyrille]

Attachment 113918

I have zero idea how anybody could think that was real.

[Edmond]

It's definitely a real attachment, that's for sure.

[Looper]

I spotted that that was a fake before I read Takeys post since the Mare Serenitatis is anti-clockwise from the Mare Imbrium instead of clockwise.

Latest and best pic of the eclipse :

They mirrored the moon image in the 1st one for some reason when they were aggregating the composite images.

In the second one the Mare Serenitatis is clockwise



Also I have never seen an image of the moon in shadow where details of the Mares were able to be resolved even during a regular new moon, so very unlikely they would suddenly be able to do it for an eclipse.

[Salsa dancer]

NASA's Voyager 1 resumes sending engineering updates to Earth

April 22, 2024

For the first time since November, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars).


Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed that the issue was tied to one of the spacecraft's three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it's sent to Earth.

The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory—including some of the FDS computer's software code—isn't working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.
So they devised a plan to divide affected the code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.

The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft's engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22.5 hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22.5 hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification had worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.

During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.
Voyager 2 continues to operate normally. Launched over 46 years ago, the twin Voyager spacecraft are the longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history. Before the start of their interstellar exploration, both probes flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune.

NASA's Voyager 1 resumes sending engineering updates to Earth