It interesting that the memory is so discrete that it can be reprogrammed when a single ROM fails. And it’s really neat that they made the whole thing accessible to a radio controlled boot loader. The planning that went into building and maintaining Voyager is really incredible.

I wonder if we could still build one as robust these days?

The problem was that Voyager sent junk data back to us due to a memory fault. It was still responsive to receive updates from Earth and to pings.

Pinging Voyager 1 takes about 2 days, so testing updates is naturally quite slow.

Im guessing it could still listen just not talk back

Edit read the article

Although the radio signal from the spacecraft had never ceased its connection to ground control operators on Earth during the computer problem, that signal had not carried any usable data since

It's simple rocket science

This Satelite must offer option to install software updates over the air, so they modified software and slowly uploaded it to the satelite.

I know that this is supposed to be a joke, and I do find it funny, but I also find it sad that it carries a large dose of truth. C is such a "low-level" high-level language that it makes you deal directly with memory allocation and management as well as pointer arithmetic to advance addresses in the stack, which in my opinion is very important for programmers to gain an understanding of the actual hardware and architecture their programs are running on, because I feel that many don't have that understanding. Should Rust replace C in many applications, especially low-level, I fear that we will ultimately end up with worse code because of that. (BTW I know that Voyager's program is not written in C, this is just purely about your statement on Rust.)