Y'all, the world is sleeping on what NASA just pulled off with Voyager 1
The probe has been sending gibberish science data back to Earth, and scientists feared it was just the probe finally dying. You know, after working for 50 GODDAMN YEARS and LEAVING THE GODDAMN SOLAR SYSTEM and STILL CHURNING OUT GODDAMN DATA.
So they analyzed the gibberish and realized that in it was a total readout of EVERYTHING ON THE PROBE. Data, the programming, hardware specs and status, everything. They realized that one of the chips was malfunctioning.
So what do you do when your probe is 22 Billion km away and needs a fix? Why, you just REPROGRAM THAT ENTIRE GODDAMN THING. Told it to avoid the bad chip, store the data elsewhere.
Sent the new code on April 18th. Got a response on April 20th - yeah, it's so far away that it took that long just to transmit.
And the probe is working again.
From a programmer's perspective, that may be the most fucking impressive thing I have ever heard.
I also am absolutely gobsmacked how the support team -- who, after 50 years, are getting up there -- have been mentoring younger engineers that have been brought onto the project.
Nobody expected Voyager to be active this long. But when confronted with it's (very fucking impressive) lifespan, older staff have been passing on their vast and esoteric knowledge of Voyager's inner working to the next generation.
It's like, an order of medieval monks. The Ancient Order of Voyager 1.
Everything about the Voyager project is incredible.
