Humanity’s most distant spacecraft is malfunctioning once more, and engineers are struggling to resolve the issue. Voyager 1, what are we going to do to you?
The issue lies with the 46-year-old Voyager 1’s Flight Information System (FDS), one in every of its three onboard computer systems. FDS collects knowledge from Voyager’s science devices and obtains knowledge on the standing and total well being of the spacecraft. The system was not speaking correctly with the telemetry modulation unit, which truly takes the info collected by the system and sends it to Earth.
It is simply the newest in a sequence of communications issues for the getting older Voyager 1, which launched in 1977 and adopted the launch of dual spacecraft Voyager 2. In Could 2022, the probe abruptly started to carry out its mission Meaningless Perspective Expression and Management (AACS) knowledge. Suzanne Dodd, the Voyager mission’s venture supervisor, described the glitch as “regular at this stage.”
It seems that the info was transmitted by a defective laptop on the spacecraft, inflicting interpreters on Earth to learn it as gibberish. Engineers solved the issue by sending telemetry knowledge by one other laptop on the spacecraft. Within the three months between the issue’s onset and its decision, Voyager 1 traveled 100 million miles.
December 2023 Voyager 1 restoration mission garbled code; The telemetry modulation unit started emitting binary codes that appeared to point that it was caught. The mission staff believed that the issue did lie with the FDS as a result of the info truly got here from the FDS. The Voyager staff tried to resolve this problem by restarting FDS, however failed. The nonsense stays.
“It might be the most important miracle if we may get it again. We actually did not surrender,” Dodd Inform Ars Technica. “There are different issues we will strive. However that is by far the worst in my time as a case supervisor.”
Voyager 1 is 15.14 billion miles away and continued to hurry at over 38,000 mph. Two months have handed and the issue continues to be not resolved.
“We will discuss to the spacecraft and it might probably hear us, however it’s a gradual course of given the spacecraft’s unbelievable distance from Earth,” NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory stated. said on twitter. Every message despatched to Voyager takes 22.5 hours to achieve the detector and vice versa.
Regardless, the Voyager mission is almost 50 years previous. They served their unique objective many years in the past, so the info we get from them day by day is a bonus. When the 2 Voyager spacecraft lastly burn out or abandon knowledge assortment, they’ll nonetheless be gliding — flying — into the starry infinity vistas that any of us can dream of in a courageous retirement plan.
tomorrow: NASA energy hack extends Voyager 2’s 45-year mission even additional