Artist’s conception of Voyager 1, the famous NASA spacecraft that for 4 months has actually been experiencing concerns with its onboard computer system systems, obstructing any type of intelligible interaction with researchers in the world. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)
After a nail-biting 4 months, NASA has actually lastly gotten an understandable signal from its Voyager 1 spacecraft.
Because November 2023, the almost-50-year-old spacecraft has actually been experiencing problem with its onboard computer systems. Voyager 1, one of NASA’s longest-lived area objectives, has actually been sending out a stable radio signal to Earth, it hasn’t consisted of any functional information, which has actually astonished researchers.
Now, in action to a command timely, or “poke,” sent out from Earth on March 1, NASA has actually gotten a brand-new signal from Voyager 1 that engineers have actually had the ability to decipher. Objective researchers hope this info might assist them describe the spacecraft’s current interaction issues.
“The source of the problem seems with among 3 onboard computer systems, the flight information subsystem (FDS), which is accountable for product packaging the science and engineering information before it’s sent out to Earth by the telemetry modulation system,” NASA stated in a post Wednesday (March 13).
Related: NASA’s 46-year-old Voyager 1 probe is no longer transferring information
On March 1, as part of efforts to discover an option to Voyager 1’s computer system concerns, NASA sent out a command to the FDS on the spacecraft, advising it to utilize various series in its software application bundle, which would efficiently imply skirting around any information that might be damaged.
Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth. This implies any radio signals sent out from our world take 22.5 hours to reach the spacecraft, with any reaction taking the exact same time to be gotten by antennas in the world.
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On March 3, NASA discovered activity from one area of the FDS that varied from the “unreadable information stream” they ‘d formerly been getting. 4 days later on, engineers began the heavy job of attempting to decipher this signal. By March 10, the group found that the signal included a readout of the whole FDS memory. This consisted of the directions for what the FDS required to do, any worths in its code that can be altered depending upon commands from NASA or the spacecraft’s status, and downloadable science or engineering information.
Voyager 1 has actually ventured further from Earth than any other human-made item. It was released in 1977, within weeks of its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2. The preliminary goal of the objective was to check out Jupiter and Saturn. After nearly 5 years, and with numerous discoveries under their belts, the objective continues beyond the limits of the solar system.
NASA researchers will now “compare this readout to the one that boiled down before the concern occurred and search for disparities in the code and the variables to possibly discover the source of the continuous problem,” they stated in the article.