Dubai, United Arab Emirates (CNN) — US space agency engineers sent…NASA” reference to the Voyager 1 space probe and received a potentially encouraging response, giving them hope of fixing the communication problem with the old spacecraft that had been going on for five months.
The “Voyager 1” probe, and its counterpart “Voyager 2”, were launched in 1977, with the aim of exploring an unknown cosmic region along the outer borders of the solar system.
While Voyager 1 continued to send a stable radio signal to its mission control team on Earth, this signal had not carried any usable data since November, indicating a problem with one of the three computers on board the spacecraft.
A new signal that NASA’s mission team recently received from the spacecraft indicates that it may be making progress in its quest to understand what Voyager 1 is going through.
Voyager 1 is currently the farthest spacecraft from Earth, about 24 billion kilometers away.
At the same time, Voyager 2 traveled more than 20.3 billion kilometers away from our planet.
The two vehicles are located in interstellar space, and they are the only ones operating outside the heliosphere, which is an inflated bubble of solar wind made up of magnetic fields and particles that extends beyond the orbit of the planet Pluto.
Although initially designed to last for five years, the Voyager 1 and 2 probes are the longest-running spacecraft in history.
Their exceptionally long stays mean that they have provided additional insights into our solar system and beyond, after achieving their initial goals of orbiting Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune decades ago.
But both probes faced challenges along the way over time.
Collapse of cosmic communications
The mission team first noticed a communication problem with Voyager 1 on November 14, 2023, when the flight data system’s telemetry modulation module began sending a repetitive pattern of code.
Voyager 1’s flight data system collects information from the spacecraft’s science instruments and adds it to engineering data that reflects the current health status.
Mission Control on Earth receives that data in the form of a binary code, or a string of ones and zeros.
But since last November, Voyager 1’s flight data system has been stuck in a loop.
The spacecraft can still receive and execute commands sent by the mission team, but a problem occurred in that communications module that resulted in no scientific or engineering data being sent from Voyager 1 to Earth.
Since discovering the problem, the mission team has attempted to send commands to restart the computer system and learn more about the root cause of the problem.
The team sent a signal called “poke” to Voyager 1 on March 1 to make the flight data system run different programming sequences in the event of some kind of glitch causing the problem.
On March 3, the team noticed that activity from one part of the flight data system stood out from the rest of the garbled data.
Although the signal was not in the format the Voyager team is accustomed to when the flight data system works as expected, an engineer with NASA’s Deep Space Surveillance Network was able to decode it.
NASA’s Deep Space Observing Network is a system of radio antennas on Earth that helps the agency communicate with the Voyager probes and other spacecraft exploring our solar system.
The decoded signal included a readout of the entire flight data system memory, according to an update shared by NASA.
“The (Flight Data System) memory includes its own code, or instructions for what to do, as well as variables used in the code that can change based on commands or the state of the spacecraft,” according to a NASA blog post.
Through it, the team will compare this reading with the one that appeared before the problem occurred and look for inconsistencies in the code and variables to find the source of the ongoing problem.
Currently, the team is analyzing Voyager 1’s memory readings after the decryption process began on March 7 and found the reading three days later.
