SPACE — NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending various mysterious messages since November 2023. Now NASA scientists have identified the problem and found a potential solution that can be implemented.
For decades, the 46-year-old probe sent out regular radio signals as it moved away from our solar system. Voyager 1 is currently more than 15 billion miles or 24 billion kilometers from Earth. The radio signal message took 22.5 hours to travel from the craft to our planet. Vice versa.
But in November 2023, the signal message sent by Voyager 1 suddenly became garbled. Scientists were unable to read the mysterious data and they were confused about what had happened to the rover.
Until last March, NASA engineers sent a command prompt, or ‘poke’ to the plane. They hope to get readings from Voyager 1’s flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS functions to package the craft’s science and engineering data before sending it to Earth.
Also read: Voyager 1 finally sends a readable message from interstellar space, what’s in it?
Luckily, Voyager 1’s final response code was cracked and engineers found the source of the problem. According to them, the plane’s FDS memory had been damaged.
“The team suspects that one chip responsible for storing parts of the FDS memory is malfunctioning,” NASA said in a blog post.
However, engineers couldn’t determine for sure what was causing the problem. Two possibilities are that the chip was hit by energetic particles from outer space or that it was damaged due to its 46 year operating age.
Engineers claim to be able to find a solution to run FDS without damaged chips. This means they were able to recover Voyager 1’s sent messages, allowing it to continue sending information from interstellar space. However, recovery will take several months.
Also read: Voyager 1’s mission to explore interstellar space will soon end, this is the mission controller’s confession
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 passed by Saturn in 1979 and Jupiter in 1980. It then flew into interstellar space in 2012. Now, it is recording conditions outside the sun’s protective magnetic field, or heliosphere, which envelops our solar system. Source: Live Science
2024-04-06 14:10:22
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