(Science Week, day 6!)

I've just watched the recent documentary "It's Quieter In The Twilight", covering the recent state of the remaining NASA team still keeping in touch with the original two Voyager spacecraft. It's a wonderful look at how underwhelming and personal the workplace is for a mission that still has exclusive claim to the exploration of interstellar space.

The drama in this film was driven by examples of the delicateness of maintaining and communicating with these devices, which are over a light-day away and have ominously finite power.

"Sadly," the film was completed just before this particularly remarkable story, summarized tidily by Naomi Hartono for NASA:

> The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.

The "FDS" is apparently responsible for assembling the probe's readings for delivery to Earth, and the problem was eventually solved by uploading entire blocks of code to be written to several usable areas of memory while tweaking existing code to connect with it all. This is all for a 50-year-old computer outside the solar system, involving a span of well over a day to send any signal and receive any response. It's very quick to read, and a shame to miss. (And now that I've seen the documentary, I recognize the team from the photo!)

• NASA column