Jakarta, Gatra.com- The month of Ramadan may be a blessing for scientists from the American Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). After four months of muttering that made data sent from the Voyager 1 spacecraft incomprehensible, NASA scientists got a new stroke of luck after sending a “poke.”
After four tense months, NASA finally received an intelligible signal from its Voyager 1 spacecraft.
Since November 2023, the nearly 50-year-old spacecraft has been experiencing problems with its onboard computers. Although Voyager 1, one of NASA’s longest-lived space missions, had sent steady radio signals to Earth, its messages did not contain any usable data, confusing scientists.
Now, in response to command prompt, or “poke,” sent from Earth on March 1, NASA has received a new signal from Voyager 1 that engineers were able to decipher. Mission scientists hope this information will help them explain recent spacecraft communications problems.
“The source of the problem appears to be in one of the three on-board computers, the flight data subsystem (FDS), which is responsible for packaging science and engineering data before it is sent to Earth by the telemetry modulation unit,” NASA said in a statement Wednesday (March 13) .
On March 1, as part of an effort to find a solution to Voyager 1’s computer problems, NASA sent a command to the FDS on the spacecraft, instructing it to use a different sequence in its software package, which effectively meant avoiding any data that might be present. become damaged.
Voyager 1 sent messages from ‘heaven’ more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth. This means that any radio signal sent from our planet would take 22.5 hours to reach the spacecraft, and any response would take the same amount of time to be picked up by antennas on Earth.
On March 3, NASA detected activity from one part of the FDS that differed from the “unreadable data stream” they had previously received. Four days later, engineers began the arduous task of trying to decode this signal. On March 10, the team discovered that the signal contained a read of the entire FDS memory. This includes instructions regarding what the FDS needs to do, any values in its code that can be changed depending on commands from NASA or the status of the spacecraft, and downloadable science or engineering data.
Voyager 1 has traveled farther from Earth than any other human-made object. It was launched in 1977, several weeks ahead of its sister spacecraft, Voyager 2. The mission’s initial goal was to explore Jupiter and Saturn. But after nearly five decades, and with countless discoveries, the mission continues beyond the boundaries of the solar system.
NASA scientists will now “compare these readings to readings before this problem occurred and look for differences in codes and variables to find the source of the ongoing problem,” NASA said in a blog post.
However, NASA emphasized that it will take time to determine whether the insights gained from these new signals can be used to solve Voyager 1’s long-standing communications problems.
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2024-03-16 06:26:01
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