Voyager 1 failure forced NASA to look for 1977 operating manual

NASA ran into an unusual problem at its facilities because of Voyager 1, a space probe that the same administration launched in 1977 to study those planets outside our solar system. A glitch in this tool forced the engineering team responsible for the project to refer to guidelines that were created 45 years ago with technical details about the ship. Problem? No documents were found.

Voyager 1’s problems began in May 2022, when engineers discovered that the probe, located about 23.5 billion kilometers from Earth, started sending confusing data through the Articulation and Attitude Control System (AACS). That is, the instrument that keeps Voyager 1’s antenna pointed at Earth.

In August, NASA confirmed in a publication that it had found and corrected the bug. They detailed that Voyager 1’s AACS “started sending telemetry data via built-in computer” that stopped working many years ago. And that the same computer “was the one who corrupted the information.” Until now, however, we have not learned that in order to localize the problem, it was necessary not only to use the manual created in 1977, but also to look for it.

Suzanne Dodd, project manager for the Voyager interstellar mission, explained: business insider what NASA engineers did not archive documentation at the timeand what many of them took the documents home. “When they retired, in the 70s and 80s, there was no particular need to have a library of design documents. People took the boxes home to the garage,” he emphasizes. Dodd. After a while, NASA was able to detect some of them; enough to find and fix Voyager 1’s malfunction.

Voyager 1 is still operating 45 years later.