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NASA just transmitted a software update 12 billion miles to Voyager 2, a feat that’s a marvel of spaceflight engineering and a testament to human achievement. It arrived with the following release notes:
“Bug fixes.”
@command_tab Do you have an idea how big the update was? Is it measured in kilobytes? Megabytes? I would find it interesting to know that
@leroc The total amount of working memory among its six computers (three types, x2 of each for redundancy) is about 70 Kilobytes, so I imagine the patch would be less than that. I’d bet that the actual diff is quite small.
@command_tab Personally, that they've been able to send this ridiculously low amount of data (by today's standards) over that distance and it still works, makes the engineering feat even more amazing.
@leroc I think I read that it was 160 bits per second (!!)
@command_tab Incredible