Voyager 1 reaches one light-day out in mid-November

Voyager 1 gets to one light-day from Earth around the middle of November. After that a command takes a full day to get there and the reply takes another day to come back.

The distance is what gets the headlines and that's fair enough, but the part I keep thinking about is the memory problem from a couple of years ago. Late in 2023 it started sending home data nobody could read. The team traced it to one failed chip in the flight data system, and in 2024 they fixed it by moving the affected code into other parts of memory.

That's hardware launched in 1977, and every change they sent took nearly two days before they found out whether it worked. In my job if I get a change wrong I usually know within a few minutes, and someone can walk over and restart the thing if it comes to that.

If I had to show new people at work one piece of engineering from the last few years it would probably be that fix, more than any of the launches. It didn't get much coverage because the result was that things went back to normal.