Voyager 1 is back and is preparing to resume collecting space data. A month after engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) resurrected the space probe, NASA has confirmed that Four tools now work fine.therefore, the spacecraft will continue its scientific work.
According to the space agency, the team of engineers carried out a series of remote repairs after communication with the probe is restored. A few weeks ago, JPL employees gave Voyager 1 the order to resume sending scientific data. At that point, only two of the four instruments responded properly, so engineers began recalibrating the remaining two.
Although Voyager 1 is now operational, NASA has not declared victory. 46-year-old space probe needs more work to resolve a failure that occurred in November 2023, when a memory failure in the flight subsystem stopped it from sending data to Earth. The chip responsible for storing part of the FDS memory stopped working, which affected part of the computer’s program code.
Linda Spilker, project scientist for NASA’s twin Voyager spacecraft at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said that I had to modify the source code of the probe. “What they need to do is move that code to a different part of memory and then make sure that whatever is using that code knows to go to the new memory location, access it and execute it,” he said . ArsTechnika.
Voyager 1 will continue to send data to Earth
Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 longest-serving space probes. Thanks to these missions, NASA has gained important information about the most distant planets in our solar system. The ships carry instruments that study plasma waves, magnetic fields and particles, and they are the only ones taking samples of interstellar space.
At the moment, Voyager 1 is more than 24 billion kilometers from our planet, which makes repairs difficult. The signal takes 22.5 hours to reach the probe and another 22.5 hours to return to Earth. Because of this, engineers have to wait almost two days to find out if their instructions are successful.
The good news is that all four tools work fine. All that remains is to resynchronize the timing software on the three computers and maintain the digital recorder that records data for the plasma wave subsystem.
Source: Hiper Textual
