A NASA image of certainly one of the Voyager spacecraft. Voyager 1 and her similar sister ship Voyager 2 … [+]
NASA’s groundbreaking Voyager 1 spacecraft has a memory problem. The space agency has been troubleshooting the older machine because it began sending back gibberish communications in November. NASA hasn’t repaired Voyager 1 yet, but engineers now know what’s bothering the spacecraft.
The error interrupted Voyager 1’s scientific work and triggered a distant diagnostic process. The team traced the issue to the flight data subsystem, a pc that communicates with the spacecraft’s telemetry modulation unit to send scientific and engineering data to Earth. The data got here back incomprehensible. The offender appears to be a single chip that is an element of the FDS.
The breakthrough got here with a NASA “poke” in March that caused Voyager 1 to send back a readout of its FDS memory. “From the readout, the team confirmed that approximately 3% of FDS memory is corrupted, preventing the computer from performing normal operations.” NASA said in an announcement on April 4.
Voyager 1’s location to this point from home poses significant challenges in troubleshooting problems. NASA talks to the spacecraft from a distance of over 15 billion miles. It takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to succeed in Voyager 1 and the identical period of time for a response to be received. It’s a slow motion fix. This also signifies that determining the precise reason for the error relies largely on educated guesswork. It could possibly be damage or an age issue. “Engineers cannot determine with certainty what caused the problem,” NASA said. “Two possibilities are that the chip was hit by a high-energy particle from space or that it simply wore out after 46 years.”
There is reason for optimism, even when Voyager 1 won’t experience a fast recovery. “Although it may take weeks or months, engineers are optimistic that they can find a way to get the FDS to function normally without the unusable storage hardware, which would allow Voyager 1 to return to providing scientific and engineering data,” NASA said .
Voyager 1 has undertaken an unprecedented journey through space. It launched its first mission in 1977 to explore our solar system and visit Jupiter and Saturn. That was just the start. The resilient spacecraft continued to fly and at last entered interstellar space in 2012. It was the primary man-made object to enterprise into the unexplored territory outside our solar system. Voyager 1’s twin, Voyager 2, crossed interstellar space in 2018.
NASA has turned off a few of Voyager 1’s scientific instruments because the spacecraft has aged, however the probe has still provided useful data about interstellar space. If an answer works, Voyager 1 will get back into the swing of science and write one other chapter in an epic story of exploration.
