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White to move and mate in two #422 - Voyager gets a software update [1]

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Date: 2023-10-24  

This past Sunday, NASA sent a software update to the Voyager 2 spacecraft, 20 billion km away. It took over 18 hours and 40 minutes for the signal, sent via the 70-m dish in Canberra, to reach the spacecraft. Uplink data rate = 16 bits/s. www.jpl.nasa.gov/...

Mind-boggling!

The software patch contains some logic to auto-recover from glitches similar to one in May 2022, when the Attitude Articulation and Control System on Voyager 1 started sending garbled data. The root cause was not fully diagnosed. Voyager 1 will be upgraded next.

Here are the locations and some vital stats on the two Voyager spacecraft, which were launched on Sept 5, 1977 and Aug 20, 1977 resp.

Did you know that Voyager has a digital ½ inch 8-track tape system for data storage, with a capacity of ~64 Mbytes? And it, along with most other components on the spacecraft, is still functioning after 46 years in space. How cool is that?

Now let’s update our mental software to solve today’s chess puzzle composed by Donald A. Smedley (1933 - 2020) British composer and FIDE Master, in 1977, the year the two Voyager spacecraft were launched.

P.S.

The chess puzzle is published on Sundays, Tuesdays and Thursdays.

It is customary for advanced players to wait till midnight ET before posting the full solution. Before then, they provide some stats about the solution (e.g., the minimum number of distinct checkmate moves), help guide others, and sometimes post hints. But there are no hard-and-fast rules; feel free to post comments as you please.

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[1] Url: https://www.dailykos.com/story/2023/10/24/2201218/-White-to-move-and-mate-in-two-422-Voyager-gets-a-software-update

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