There’s a very pleasant piece of news today: the “Voyager 1” spacecraft, which had lost contact with
NASA for several months, has successfully been repaired and has smoothly sent back data.
The problem was caused by a fault in a computer memory chip, and
NASA remotely moved the data to another chip.
The impressive details are:
-
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, the same age as the original Apple II.
-
Because Voyager 1 has flown out of the solar system and is too far away, it takes 22.5 hours for one operation instruction from the NASA engineers to reach Voyager 1. Similarly, it takes 22.5 hours to return a result.
There’s no slower computer operation in the world, and, of course, no greater computer operation than this.
© Copyright notes
The copyright of the article belongs to the author, please do not reprint without permission.
