Which is why I am still working, mostly full time, though if I want to take off and go fishing or go play with the grandkids i do it. I enjoy training the younger kids and passing along my tribal knowledge of nuke power plants and the PEPSE program. None of the nuke plants these days leave a young engineer in the plant performance position long enough to get really good at it.

I wonder if any of the original programmers were involved in this effort? Even if they were fresh out of college, they'd be nearing 70 now.

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Paul
If we weren't all crazy, we would go insane - Jimmy Buffett
NAR #87246 www.wooshrocketry.org

Answer may be here, although not about their most recent problem, a film I just learned about and am watching right now:

Amazon Prime freeview:

It's Quieter in the Twilight
Fighting outdated technology and time, Voyager's flight-team pursues humankind's greatest exploration.
IMDb 7.3
1 h 24 min
2023

https://www.amazon.com/Its-Quieter-...d/dp/B0BX2JNSJ7

__________________
The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan

Why NASA Needs a Programmer Fluent In 60-Year-Old Languages
To keep the Voyager 1 and 2 crafts going, NASA's new hire has to know FORTRAN and assembly languages.
OCT 29, 2015

https://www.popularmechanics.com/sp...iring-engineer/

Excerpts:

Larry Zottarelli, the last original Voyager engineer still on the project, is retiring after a long and storied history at JPL. While there are still a few hands around who worked on the original project, now the job of keeping this now-interstellar spacecraft going will fall to someone else. And that someone needs to have some very specific skills.

Yes, it's going to require coding, but it won't be in Ruby on Rails or Python. Not C or C++. Go a little further back, to the assembly languages used in early computing. Know Cobol? Can you breeze through Fortran? Remember your Algol? Those fancy new languages from the late 1950s? Then you might be the person for the job.

The last true software overhaul was in 1990, after the 1989 Neptune encounter and at the beginning of the interstellar mission. "The flight software was basically completely re-written in order to have a spacecraft that could be nearly autonomous and continue sending back data to us even if we lost communication with it," Dodd said. "It has a looping routine of activities that it does automatically on board and then we augment that with sequences that we send up every three months."

"[The original engineers] said, 'This subsystem takes 3.2 watts of power.' Well, it really took 3 watts, but they wanted to be conservative when they built the spacecraft," Dodd says. "Now, we are at the point in the mission where we are trying to get rid of the margins and get the actual numbers."

That's when it's time to turn back to old documents to figure out the logic behind some of the engineering decisions. Dodd says it's easy to find the engineering decisions, but harder to find the reasoning. This means combing through secondary documents and correspondence hoping to find the solution, trying to get in another engineer's head.

The last resort is picking those engineers' brains directly. Many are retired, and are working on 40-year-old memories. Still, the small team working on Voyager today has a list of engineers and others on-hand to call in emergencies. Dodd herself has worked on the spacecraft off and on since 1984, just before the Uranus flyby.

"People's memories 40 years later aren't always accurate," Dodd says. "It's good to have that data point, but you can't guarantee 100% that that was the correct rationale when somebody's trying to recall it."

The clock is ticking. It's time to find a new engineer as Zottarelli prepares to retire. There will be six months to a year of on-the-job training, but that's about it. Dodd isn't holding out hope for some up-and-coming young coder who work on the project for decades to come. She says instead its closer to walking up and down the halls of JPL, hoping to nab an experienced someone slightly younger than the retirees with enough of a basis in assembly languages to keep the spacecraft going.

"I'm typically not getting a fresh college grad, I'm more or less getting people in their early 50s as opposed to people that are in their 70s," she says.

Just a warning for would-be programmers: these languages aren't on code academy.

-----------

In that documentary, Lu Yang was listed as working in the Command and Data Systems section, but who was involved in the recent reprogramming wasn't specifically mentioned. However, she's probably in charge:

The Loyal Engineers Steering NASA's Voyager Probes Across the Universe
AUGUST 3, 2017

https://nasaumb.blogspot.com/2017/0...ering-nasa.html

Then:

In the early spring of 1977, Larry Zottarelli, a 40-year-old computer engineer at NASA?s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, set out for Cape Canaveral, Fla., in his Toyota Corolla.

2017:

Later that morning, when Zottarelli entered the conference room to attend his last daily flight-team briefing, his colleague Adans Ko, 58, was arranging takeout containers of dim sum on the table for a celebration. He threw an arm around his shoulders and said, ??Larry is going to give me a kiss today!?? Matsumoto, who was holding a camera, said, ??O.K., look at me.?? She was making a photo album for him. When the party broke up, I found Zottarelli?s replacement, Lu Yang, at her desk. I asked her if he had given her any specific advice. ??Whatever the problem, you go there and solve it,?? she said, and laughed.

__________________
The other day I sat next to a woman who has a profound fear of flying. I wanted to comfort her, so I said, "Don't worry, we're not gonna' crash. Statistically, we got a better chance of being bitten by a shark." Then I showed her the scar on my elbow from a shark attack. I said, "I got this when my plane went down off of Florida." - Dennis Regan

I remember being forced to learn FORTRAN 77 in college in the late 80's for my engineering curriculum.

It was obsolete THEN.

__________________
When in doubt, WHACK the GAS and DITCH the brake !!!

Yes, there is such a thing as NORMAL, if you have to ask what is "NORMAL" , you probably aren't !
Failure may not be an OPTION, but it is ALWAYS a POSSIBILITY.
ALL systems are GO for MAYHEM, CHAOS, TURMOIL, FIASCOS, and HAVOC !