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NASA’s Voyager Team Focuses on Software Patch, Thrusters | NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) 5 min read # NASA’s Voyager Team Focuses on Software Patch, Thrusters Jet Propulsion Laboratory https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/ Oct. 20, 2023 NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is depicted in this artist’s concept traveling through interstellar space, or the space between stars, which it entered in 2012. Traveling on a different trajectory, its twin, Voyager 2, entered interstellar space in 2018. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech Share to Facebook Share to X Share to Reddit Share via Email The efforts should help extend the lifetimes of the agency’s interstellar explorers. Engineers for NASA’s Voyager mission are taking steps to help make sure both spacecraft, launched in 1977, continue to explore interstellar space for years to come. One effort addresses fuel residue that seems to be accumulating inside narrow tubes in some of the thrusters on the spacecraft. The thrusters are used to keep each spacecraft’s antenna pointed at Earth. This type of buildup has been observed in a handful of other spacecraft. The team is also uploading a software patch to prevent the recurrence of a glitch that arose

Updating TGO OS – Rocket Science close ## Menu close - menu - turned_in_not - search # Updating TGO OS - access_time 30/11/2016 - chat_bubble_outline 1 comments This morning, the ExoMars Trace Gas orbiter received an updated ‘operating system’ – the basic software that runs the craft just like the Windows® software that runs a PC. This week’s ‘fresh install’ is the second such update for TGO since launch, and will include fixes and patches for a number of issues discovered since launch. Credit: ESA/ATG medialab We posted a detailed description of the last update, and the procedure for today was substantially similar to that one, done in April. Today’s update activates 3 MB of new code, that was transmitted a few days ago via ESA’s 35-m diameter deep-space station at New Norcia. Today’s critical action was centered on rebooting the computer, triggering a restart with the new software. In particular, this OS update will ensure the craft is more robust, especially in the event of any unexpected problems, during the upcoming aerobraking campaign, set to start in March and last until early 2018. During aerobraking, the craft will skim the wispy tops of the martian atmospher

Software upgrade at 655 million kilometres – Rosetta – ESA's comet chaser close ## Menu close - menu - turned_in_not - search # Software upgrade at 655 million kilometres - access_time 28/03/2014 - chat_bubble_outline 9 comments Mark Bentley, Principal Investigator for MIDAS, talks us through tonight’s activities to upgrade the instrument’s software. Software upgrades are something we are all too familiar with – almost every day small fixes, or patches, are ready to download to our computers, phones and tablets. Mostly these are a minor inconvenience, but sometimes something goes wrong and you’re left with a computer that won’t boot. As annoying as this is, the worst case scenario is usually a re-install of the operating system. Checking out MIDAS But what if you’re upgrading the software on an instrument flying onboard a spacecraft 655 million km from the Earth? The answer is in a careful design of the instrument followed by testing, testing and more testing on the ground! When MIDAS is first powered up, it boots into “kernel mode” – the kernel manages a very robust set of basic operations for communicating with the spacecraft and the ground and for managing the more co

The Solar Radiation and Climate Experiment (SORCE) was a NASA mission that operated from 2003 to 2020 to provide key climate-monitoring measurements of total solar irradiance (TSI) and solar spectral irradiance (SSI). Three important accomplishments of the SORCE mission are i) the continuation of the 42-year-long TSI climate data record, ii) the continuation of the ultraviolet SSI record, and iii) the initiation of the near-ultraviolet, visible, and near-infrared SSI records. All of the SORCE instruments functioned well over the 17-year mission, which far exceeded its five-year prime mission goal. The SORCE spacecraft, having mostly redundant subsystems, was also robust over the mission. The end of the SORCE mission was a planned passivation of the spacecraft following a successful two-year overlap with the NASA Total and Spectral Solar Irradiance Sensor (TSIS) mission, which continues the TSI and SSI climate records. There were a couple of instrument anomalies and a few spacecraft anomalies during SORCE's long mission, but operational changes and updates to flight software enabled SORCE to remain productive to the end of its mission. The most challenging of the anomalies was the degradation of the battery capacity that began to impact operations in 2009 and was the cause for the largest SORCE data gap (August 2013 - February 2014). An overview of the SORCE mission is provided with a couple of science highlights and a discussion of flight anomalies that impacted the solar observations. Companion articles about the SORCE instruments and their final science data-processing algorithms provide additional details about the instrument measurements over the duration of the mission.