Voyager Spacecraft Code
3 days ago
- #NASA-history
- #space-technology
- #legacy-systems
- Voyager spacecraft run on purpose-built assembly language, not Fortran, with three onboard computer systems.
- Original documentation is fragmented or lost, complicating maintenance as the team relies on institutional memory.
- The current engineering team is small but not mostly in their 80s, with a need for assembly programming skills.
- Hardware decline and power loss will likely end science data before engineering data, with operations possible until around 2036.