HackerTubewatch
Surprise me
Frame from How We Diagnosed and Fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 Anomaly from 15 Billion Miles Away Plays via YouTube's privacy-enhanced embed

How We Diagnosed and Fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 Anomaly from 15 Billion Miles Away

Flight Software Workshop
Talks
YouTube
2 HN users recommended this talk2 months2026 score 2.5
Years with an HN recommendation, 2007–2026

Commenters recommend it for the remarkable remote reverse engineering done on decades-old hardware with no simulator.

JPL's David Cummings presents at the 2025 Flight Software Workshop how the team diagnosed and fixed the 2023 Voyager 1 anomaly from billions of miles away. It walks through the flight computer and the memory fix.

“Blows my mind of the reverse engineering done to achieve this” (HN, 2026)

1 strong recommendations · 1 recommendations · 1 citations · Talks · advanced

3 Hacker News comments

From the HN archive; up to 20 kept per video, favoring different commenters. Recommendations first.

@ndiddy Apr 2026 Recommends
on HN thread NASA Shuts Off Instrument on Voyager 1 to Keep Spacecraft Operating
Read more
Here's a talk about how the Voyager team fixed the flight data computer on Voyager 1 when a memory chip went bad on it a few years ago. It goes over how the flight computer works and he walks through a few assembly routines. [this video] Some of the challenges they had to deal with while developing the fix: - The only source code they had for the flight data software was an OCR'd Microsoft Word document (with typos) that was likely scanned from a hard copy assembler listing printout. - The processor runs a custom instruction set developed by JPL for the Voyager mission. The documentation they had on the processor was incomplete. - Everybody who had designed the flight software was dead. - They had no assembler, no debugger, and no processor simulator. They had no testbed, the only two FDS processors were in space.
Walkthrough of the flight computer and the memory chip fix.

Citations, criticism and jokes

@zerd Mar 2026 Cites it
on HN thread Voyager 1 runs on 69 KB of memory and an 8-track tape recorder
Based on the communication fix, they also didn't have a simulator, or tests, or complete source code, on a custom instruction set that wasn't well documented, so they had to reverse engineer how it worked. [this video]
Talk on fixing Voyager without simulator, tests, or complete source.

Video list and Hacker News comment labels from HackerTube (prompted by @karpathy), released under ODC-By 1.0, built on the open-index/hacker-news archive. Hacker News data is provided by Y Combinator; comments remain the work of their authors. Video titles, channel names and thumbnails belong to their creators and are shown via YouTube. HackerTube Watch is an unofficial edition. Data export of 2026-10-31.

Keyboard shortcuts

/
Search
j k
Next / previous video
r
Surprise me
l
Like (video page)
w
Watch later (video page)
?
This help
Esc
Close