After more than five months of uncertainty, NASA was able to obtain Voyager 1 send readable information back to Earth. According to the US space agency, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have successfully completed the first stage of repairs to the probe, located more than 24 billion kilometers from our planet.
In mid-November, Voyager 1 stopped transmitting readable data to Earth. NASA confirmed that their equipment continues to function normally, but the information collected could not be packaged and sent back. After a thorough analysis in March of this year, they concluded that the problem originated in Flight data subsystemone of the probe’s three computers.
One of the chips that stores memory and part of the code of this computer has stopped working. This has left experts scrambling to find a solution, no easy task given Voyager 1’s age, the limitations of the hardware on board and the delay between sending and receiving radio signals. Let’s keep in mind that any order sent to a ship takes 22 and a half hours to reach it, and the response to Earth takes the same amount of time.
To repair the probe, JPL engineers took code from the faulty flight data subsystem and move it to other memory locations. But since there was not enough space to move this entire block to one new location, it was decided to fragment it and distribute it among the available sectors. Adding to the challenge was the added complexity of adapting the rest of the code so that Voyager 1’s software continued to “operate as one,” NASA said.
Voyager 1 regains the ability to send readable data to Earth
Due to the complexity of this task, the US space agency decided to repair Voyager 1 remotely. The first step was to move the code responsible for packaging the probe’s technical data. This happened last Friday the 18th, and yesterday, Sunday the 20th, the ship responded positively.
This means NASA engineers can now monitor the health of Voyager 1’s systems. The next step is to move the rest of the affected code, a task that will take several weeks. Despite this, JPL hopes the probe will soon send back scientific data again.
This is not the first time Voyager 1 has had technical problems. In recent years they have become quite frequent, and it is logical that this should be so. In September he will turn 47 years in space, which will significantly exceed all the forecasts of his creators.
For example, in 2022, the probe began sending random telemetry data. NASA could not find the cause of the failure until months later when it discovered that the information was being processed from an on-board computer that had not worked for years. The engineers managed to change the computer and return everything to normal. And although they indicated that the incident could have been provoked by erroneous command, they were unable to establish its cause.
Meanwhile, last year the Jet Propulsion Laboratory had to deal with problems in Voyager 2. Voyager 1’s sister mission stopped pointing its antenna toward Earth due to an error caused by a series of instructions. This cut off all communication with the probe, which had been floating blindly in space for weeks. However, the US agency was able to restore contact after launching an “interstellar scream” from the Deep Space Network antenna in Canberra, Australia.
Source: Hiper Textual
