I do realise that a similar question was asked yesterday about hacking voyager. But it’s how the steps happen which stumps me. I get that we communicate using radio signals. I get that all computers need memory and so you need to split the memory up. I get that all computers fetch instructions, decode them, and run them. But how can you use a computer to rewrite its own code? How can you get voyager to split up it’s memory while it’s still in action?
References:
The nasa blog
Jim keller interview on wan show
Numberphile how machine code works video
In: Technology
I don’t recall exactly how they do it, but there could be several ways to do it. Modern craft have multiple processors and memory systems so they could write the new code to the backup, verify it, then switch to the backup, then write over the primary once it works properly.
Another way could be to write over unneeded code blocks from experiments that have been shutdown. Camera transmission and pointing code? Cameras were shutdown and froze up years ago. That memory space could be written over.
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