Voyager 2 left Earth on Aug. 20, 1977 to explore Jupiter and Saturn. It successfully finished that mission, then proceeded to fly on by Uranus and Neptune before heading into interstellar space.

It is currently traveling through heliopause — a region of space where the sun’s influence ebbs and interstellar forces begin to dominate. A rather interesting, and commonly unknown by the general public, portion of our solar system. Think of it a bit like a bow wave from a ship except the material replacing the sea is space/time and the ships hull is the bubble of our solar system.

Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, are both expected to enter interstellar space — the first human-made objects to do so — in the next five years which means scientists are very excited about what may be discovered in the next five years as both Voyagers push their way through the heliopause. So you can imagine their consternation when it started acting a bit like VGER from Star Trek The Motion Picture

The 33 year old piece of hardware starting speaking in tongues from 8.6 billion miles away preventing mission control from decoding any of its data. Over the course of two weeks with 26 hour round trip communication cycles and replication with exact hardware copies on Earth, the root cause of the problem was discovered to be a single memory bit that had flipped from 0 to 1. A single bit of memory caused the whole system to fail. A simple cause. The effect was catastrophic in impact but NASA did what they do best and implemented predefined processes which included troubleshooting on hardware duplicates and predefined steps through what if scenarios. They were successful. They intend to reset Voyagers memory tomorrow ~ May 20 2010.

The point to take from all of this is – no matter what system you implement you have to have a strategy for handling situations when ‘it’ does not work properly. SharePoint is a difficult product to work in depth with, and when things go wrong they are either minor or very major. But even if you’re working with something other than SharePoint have your DR strategy and related documents ready. Know, comment, and if appropriate visualize with UML, your processes and make sure that others can and will be able to understand what they say. If you do it right, even after 33 years, you can look like a superstar…

If you are interested in more information about the two Voyagers NASA has a weekly update here where you can see detail down to how much propellant the two craft have recently used and left.