Posted on 05/18/2010 11:34:34 PM PDT by ErnstStavroBlofeld
One flip of a bit in the memory of an onboard computer appears to have caused the change in the science data pattern returning from Voyager 2, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Monday, May 17. A value in a single memory location was changed from a 0 to a 1. On May 12, engineers received a full memory readout from the flight data system computer, which formats the data to send back to Earth. They isolated the one bit in the memory that had changed, and they recreated the effect on a computer at JPL.
They found the effect agrees with data coming down from the spacecraft. They are planning to reset the bit to its normal state on Wednesday, May 19.
Engineers have shifted NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft into a mode that transmits only spacecraft health and status data while they diagnose an unexpected change in the pattern of returning data.
Preliminary engineering data received on May 1 show the spacecraft is basically healthy, and that the source of the issue is the flight data system, which is responsible for formatting the data to send back to Earth. The change in the data return pattern has prevented mission managers from decoding science data.
The first changes in the return of data packets from Voyager 2, which is near the edge of our solar system, appeared on April 22. Mission team members have been working to troubleshoot and resume the regular flow of science data. Because of a planned roll maneuver and moratorium on sending commands, engineers got their first chance to send commands to the spacecraft on April 30.
It takes nearly 13 hours for signals to reach the spacecraft and nearly 13 hours for signals to come down to NASA's Deep Space Network on Earth.
(Excerpt) Read more at space-travel.com ...
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So did I. Hummm...
If you checksum the mal-formatted data, then whether it’s formatted correctly or not doesn’t matter, the checksum will still be valid unless it gets clobbered in transit.
Oh okay, never mind.
Laser light.
It was a stupid theory to begin with. Alien civilizations would have better transmitters light years ahead than one of a 33 old spacecraft that is slowly dying.
space ping
“It was a stupid theory to begin with. Alien civilizations would have better transmitters light years ahead than one of a 33 old spacecraft that is slowly dying.”
Aliens might not even use the small bit of the EM spectrum we use - or even not use the EM spectrum at all - to communicate.
Laser communication
No laser of which ever color is within what we use -— think outside the box as in fields instead of vectors to describe a comm system. cf James Clerk Maxwell (now obscure, but was greatest physicist after Newton and before Albert Einstein) — quaternions was the term he used to describe his fields, but 4 were rewritten as vectors and the other 196 were discarded, from the four comes the entire description of our EM spectrum. Aliens might use the other 196 of which we know nothing.
How about as modulated neutrino or gravitational wave emissions. These would have the advantage of being essentially immune to interference by intervening matter, but are very difficult to generate or detect with current technology.
While that could be a possibility, the point was that they may use a physics which we know nothing about as the basis of their communications. It is also a possibility that our EM based communications are in a decided minority of possible choices.
Had Maxwell's other 196 quaternions been pursued, among the possibilities described are free energy, instant communications and physical travel between any two points anywhere at any distance... what the present day world would look like would be entirely different.
But since what they describe is impossible, they must be dismissed unfollowed...
We live in a world described by machines, but what if aliens live in worlds described by devices? You see the disparity here? We cannot comprehend what they are doing because we cannot ‘see’ their ‘technology’ -— and so cannot hear their communications.
We are looking in the wrong places, but are unable to cross the line to look in the right places, since we have defined those places as impossible.
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