9:00am EST., Friday February 14th

Presenting Live via Zoom

Title: Saving Voyager 1

Both of the 47-year-old Voyager spacecraft are currently in interstellar space and returning their most important data set: in-situ measurements of the magnetic field, plasma, and dust beyond the Heliopause. In late 2023, Voyager 1 lost all downlink telemetry, and the flight team had essentially no visibility into the state of the spacecraft, which is over 15 billion miles from the Earth. This talk will detail how the flight team diagnosed the problem and formulated a recovery plan to patch the Flight Data System flight software.

Bruce Waggoner is the Mission Assurance Manager at NASA Jet Propulsion Lab/Caltech. He graduated from the University of Nebraska with a BS in Physics and Astronomy. He has worked at JPL for 39 years, supporting dozens of Earth-orbiting and deep space missions. He also volunteers as a gymnastics coach and assists teaching girls engineering and science at a local high school.