Last November, NASA's Voyager 1 sent home garbled data, and engineers traced the problem to the flight data subsystem (FDS). The problem turned out to be a single chip in the FDS memory. They couldn't repair the chip but could move the affected code into sections and store them in different parts of the FDS system. They tested the new system this week, sending signals to the Voyager 1, 22.5 light-hours away. It worked, and Voyager 1 is back.

https://blogs.nasa.gov/voyager/2024/04/22/nasas-voyager-1-resumes-sending-engineering-updates-to-earth/

We've got a new picture of Uranus captured by JWST using its NIRCam instrument, revealing the planet and its rings - even 9 of its 27 moons. Even though it's far, Uranus is a tricky subject to capture. It rotates once on its axis every 17 hours, which makes long-duration exposures difficult. Astronomers needed to combine several longer and shorter exposures of Uranus and its moons to get this final image.

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2023/12/Uranus_close-up_view_NIRCam

NASA's Fermi Gamma-ray Space Telescope has been watching the sky for 14 years, and now researchers have created a fascinating 14-year timelapse of the high-energy sky. When you watch the video, you can see the Milky Way across the center of the screen and how the Sun makes a regular journey across the sky. The bright objects away from the Milky Way are other galaxies with active galactic nuclei. Occasionally, gamma-ray bursts flash randomly across the sky.

https://svs.gsfc.nasa.gov/14399

When NASA's Lucy mission made its first flyby of asteroid Dinkinesh last week, it made the surprising discovery of a tiny moonlet. Well, hold onto your hats; a new picture from Lucy is mindblowing. That moonlet is two tiny moons gently resting side by side. This configuration is known as a contact binary, and it's very common in the Solar System, but we've never seen one up close like this and never orbiting another asteroid. If only Lucy could stick around.

https://science.nasa.gov/missions/lucy/nasas-lucy-surprises-again-observes-1st-ever-contact-binary-orbiting-asteroid/

Once again, the Universe reveals how bizarre it can be. A binary star system called AC Her appears to have a planetary disk that orbits in a polar orbit around both stars. The two stars are located almost three astronomical units, while the planetary disk is inclined almost perpendicular to the stars. Although planets have been found on polar orbits before, and circumbinary planets have been found, this is the first time we've seen this combination.

http://arxiv.org/abs/2310.19600

I've just got to say how happy I am with the Mastodon community, especially all the science/space people that I'm following. This place is the clear winner after the social media meltdown, despite its outstanding issues and missing features.

What makes me even more excited is that it's open and unmonetized, so it's completely immune to shareholder demands or the whim of a billionaire.

Don't worry if your friends aren't here yet, we're your new friends.

#mastodon

@mcnees There's so much gold in that archive, and all NASA's Flickr accounts. If I don't have any ideas for a story, I'll dig something out of there. "Remember when somebody walked on the Moon?"

@tomlevenson they've actually seen this kind of thing before. In one case the supernova hasn't gone off in one of the images.

JWST Sees the Same Supernova Three Times in an Epic Gravitational Lens

Thanks to a powerful gravitational lens, astronomers were fortunate enough to see the same supernova three times in a distant galaxy. The lens is the galaxy cluster RX J2129, located about 3.2 billion light-years from Earth. When examining the region, researchers noticed that one of the lensed galaxies is duplicated three times - and they all contain the same supernova. Because the light took different paths, the same supernova is seen hundreds of days apart, showing its evolution in a single image.

https://www.esa.int/ESA_Multimedia/Images/2023/02/Seeing_triple