A new signal from NASA’s far-flung Voyager 1 spacecraft is the key to its recovery.
It’s been four months since NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft sent an intelligible signal back to Earth, and the issue has baffled engineers tasked with overseeing the interstellar space probe.
But there is renewed optimism among the Voyager ground team based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.
On March 1, engineers sent commands to Voyager 1—more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away from Earth—to “gently ask” one of the spacecraft’s computers to try a different sequence in its software package.
This is the latest step in NASA’s long-range troubleshooting to try to isolate the cause of the problem that prevented Voyager 1 from sending coherent telemetry data.
Also read: NASA needs a ‘miracle’ to save Voyager 1
Solving Cases
Officials suspect a faulty memory section inside the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), one of the three main computers on the spacecraft, was the most likely cause of the disruption to normal communications.
Because Voyager 1 was so far away, it took engineers on the ground about 45 hours to figure out how the spacecraft would react to their commands—the one-way travel time for light is about 22.5 hours.
FDS collects science and engineering data from the spacecraft’s sensors, then combines the information into a single data packet, which passes through a separate component called the Telemetry Modulation Unit to transmit it back to Earth via Voyager’s high-gain antenna.
As reported by Ars Technica, engineers are almost completely sure that the problem is with the FDS computer.
The communications system on Voyager 1 appears to be functioning normally, and the spacecraft is sending steady radio tones back to Earth, but there is no usable data in the signals.
This means engineers knew Voyager 1 was still alive, but they didn’t know which part of the FDS memory was causing the problem.
But Voyager 1 responded to a March 1 troubleshooting order with something different than what engineers have seen since the problem first emerged on November 14.
“The new signal was still not in the format used by Voyager 1 when FDS was working properly, so the team was initially unsure what to do,” NASA said in an update on Wednesday.
2024-03-16 23:36:00
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