April 8, 2024 – 11:54 am
In the best case, the solution will have to wait weeks, but NASA now knows for sure why the Voyager 1 spacecraft whizzing through interstellar space, roughly 24 billion kilometers from Earth, has been sending unintelligible data for months. The space agency’s engineers were already able to extract data from the flight data computer (FDS) in March, and their analysis revealed that part of the computer’s memory had failed and was therefore not working properly.
The FDS is responsible for packaging science and engineering data before the probe sends it back to Earth with the Telemetry Management System (TMU) and radio transmitter, NASA said in a statement. First, a problem arising from the entanglement of communication between FDS and TMU It reared its head at the end of 2022but then it was solved by redirecting the telemetry data to another computer.
Last year, the matter came up again, so the NASA engineers sent an order in early March that the FDS read its entire memory. It turned out that 3 percent of the FDS’s memory has failed, which is why they are receiving unintelligible data from the spacecraft. At NASA, they suspect that a single chip may have been damaged, either because it was hit by an energetic particle, or because it simply could not withstand the 46-year journey in space any longer.
It could take months to fix the problem, but engineers are confident they can restore normal operation without the useless chip and Voyager-1 will be able to send data again.
Voyager-1 was launched into space in 1977, a few weeks after its twin Voyager-2. The former flew by Jupiter and Saturn, and the latter by Uranus and Neptune to begin exploring interstellar space. In August 2012, Voyager-1 was the first to exit the heliosphere, i.e. the Sun’s magnetosphere, which is filled by the star’s particle radiation, i.e. the solar wind. Anyway, Voyager-2 is currently working as intended.
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