2010-05-31, 12:53 AM
http://www.dailytech.com/article.aspx?newsid=18554
Awesome.
Quote:Voyager 2 was launched 33 years ago and currently remains on course, traveling out of the solar system. It is currently 8.6 billion miles (13.8 billion km) from Earth, passing through the heliosphere, a magnetic bubble that surrounds our solar system. It continues to transmit data, even as it passes through this volatile region.
However, three weeks ago the probe started transmitting garbled messages to Earth. NASA program administrators put the spacecraft in an engineering mode, restricting it to only sending health updates to Earth, while they diagnosed the issue.
It turns out the problem was caused by a single bit in the probe's memory that had flipped . . . it's unclear exactly what caused the bit flip instance.
Awesome.