Voyagers - Fabulous machines?

Should that be the reading thread?

 

But then......the worm and the robin.

 

"... ant impersonating spiders..." Oh me hearties, you have no idea of stuff like this that has been happening for >200 million years. No idea

 

Voyager 1 regains communications!

Voyager 1 regains communications with NASA after inventive fix | CNN

It has always been alive, but the data downlink back to Earth broke in November when it starting sending a repeating loop of gobblegook. They eventually figured out that one memory chip (of 32?) was corrupted. That chip remains unfixable, but its code can be moved piecemeal to other memory segments, and the portions moved so far have been successful.

 

Late to the thread but I had the privilege of knowing a man who was at JPL and intimately involved with those space shots back then. He and his wife were customers at my dad's pharmacy. He was absolutely brilliant to the point his wife handled just about everything in their daily lives because he just couldn't relate to the lower-intelligence masses. I never saw him anywhere without a notepad and slide rule in his hands, always lost in his own thoughts. I still think of him often when we're watching the series Sheldon on tv or reading about any space shots.

My dad's cousin worked with the astronauts through the Mercury, Gemini and Apollo programs but quit when NASA moved forward with the space shuttle program. He took the loss of anyone in the programs really hard and he believed the shuttles were too complicated. He felt they were major accidents waiting to happen so he retired. He was getting up there in age anyway.