After more than 3 months of not being able to send any real data to earth, the venerable Voyager 1 spacecraft finally sent some data which might help fix the issuing ailing the 46-year old spacecraft.
Since November 2023, instead of sending science and engineering data, Voyager 1 has been sending a 0101 bit pattern. The problem has been narrowed down to the Flight Data System (FDS), which is not communicating properly with the telecom unit (TMU). A “bit-flip” in its memory is suspected (it has happened before) but identifying the location has proven to be difficult since, even though Voyager is capable of receiving and responding to commands, the data sent back is still 0101…
After months of attempts to get the spacecraft to send back an image of its memory, NASA engineers struck gold on March 3, when they noticed that the received data stream was not all 0101. On closer inspection, the decoded stream contained a read-out of the entire FDS memory! Hopefully, NASA scientists can now identify and fix the corrupted memory words. blogs.nasa.gov/...
Note that its takes over 45 hours to send a command and receive its response from Voyager 1. Talk about debugging a 1970’s era computer and its software from 22.5 light-hours away!
Now let’s solve today’s puzzle composed in 1932 by noted Argentinian chess composer Arnoldo Ellerman (1893 - 1969).
P.S.
The chess puzzle is published on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays at 6:00 p.m. ET.
It is customary for advanced players to wait till midnight ET before posting the full solution. Before then, they provide some stats about the solution (e.g., the minimum number of distinct checkmate moves), help guide others, and sometimes post hints. But there are no hard-and-fast rules; feel free to post comments as you please.