[6mian]

It's astonishing they managed to debug and fix this, given how old and how far away Voyager is. I wonder if currently created designs are so robust in terms of repairability. Obviously, everything is much higher-level now; is it possible to fall back to something like low-level, direct memory access communication if something in higher layers fails?

I'm glad to see so many senior engineers on the team; it must be an exciting lifelong journey to work on the mission.

[Wowfunhappy]

> Obviously, everything is much higher-level now; is it possible to fall back to something like low-level, direct memory access communication if something in higher layers fails?

I have a feeling that code for NASA spacecrafts is not so high-level, for a reason.

[davedx]

From what I understand current flight control systems are still written in relatively low level languages like C++, with extremely careful memory management strategies.

[luc_]

Yes, C++ may even be too far. Writing C in a very regimented way to run on very old processors by today's standards is 'aerospace grade (tm)'.

[seydor]

Let's not be overly pessimistic. Even today's phones have a low-level debug backdoor. I imagine Voyager3 with today's tech would provide much more interesting data, but it's a matter of time, who wants to wait another 50 years