"Doug Dotson" dougdotson@NOSPAMcablespeedNOSPAMcom wrote in
:

Exactly. It is a last ditch backup in the unlikely event that a bug
common to all 4
of the other computers causes a failure. What book are you referring
to? I read it
an article in Communications of the ACM about 1982.




Does anyone know how many times the Voyager spacecrafts have been rebooted
or have failed? I do know storage is on a tape cassette, of which there
are two aboard. Voyager I is running on the same tape drive...the same
cassette!!...that it was using in 1967. The other drive is booted weekly
and the drive tape is moved to prevent the rubber wheels from getting a
dent in them, but has never been used online because Tape One is still
running perfectly.....fascinating stuff so many years ago.

At the edge of the sun's influence, data rates are in bytes per MINUTE,
now, not seconds....(c;

http://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/
Watch the new movie about it going beyond the termination shock into the
heliopause.

Every time we contact it, it sets a new DX record....(c; Can you imagine
the ATTENUATION between it and us?!

Oh, its transmitter uses traveling wave tubes. Both of them are also STILL
working fine after 25 years on the air! The spare is still in standby...
There used to be a webpage where you could read all the data coming back
from Voyager, in near-realtime. But, now that it's so FAR out there, the
data only comes back at very long intervals so they dropped the webpage. I
tracked the traveling wave tube parameters for years from the website....

--
Larry