After months of sending unusable information to mission management, there’s lastly hope for the Voyager 1 spacecraft. NASA engineers pinpointed the trigger behind the mission’s odd anomaly, and assume they will help the interstellar probe make sense once more.
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory imagine the Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending nonsensical information because of corrupted reminiscence {hardware} within the spacecraft’s flight information system (FDS). “The workforce suspects {that a} single chip answerable for storing a part of the affected portion of the FDS reminiscence isn’t working,” NASA wrote in an replace.
FDS collects information from Voyager’s science devices, in addition to engineering information concerning the well being of the spacecraft, and combines them right into a single package deal that’s transmitted to Earth via one of many probe’s subsystems, the telemetry modulation unit (TMU), in binary code.
FDS and TMU have been having hassle speaking with each other. Because of this, TMU has been sending information to mission management in a repeating sample of ones and zeroes. NASA’s engineers aren’t fairly certain what corrupted the FDS reminiscence {hardware}; they assume that both the chip was hit by an lively particle from house or that it’s simply worn out after working for 46 years.
Voyager 1 launched in 1977, lower than a month after its twin probe, Voyager 2, started its personal journey to house. The probe ventured into interstellar house in August 2012, changing into the primary spacecraft to go away the heliosphere.
The issue first started in Might 2022, when the probe all of a sudden began sending nonsensical attitude articulation and control (AACS) data. Engineers resolved the difficulty by sending the telemetry information via one of many spacecraft’s different computer systems. In December 2023, Voyager 1 started speaking gibberish again.
On March 1, the workforce despatched a “poke” to the spacecraft’s information system, a command that lightly prompts FDS to strive totally different sequences in its software program package deal in an effort to pinpoint the corrupted part. Two days later, Voyager 1 sent a signal that contained a readout of the entire FDS memory, which helped the workforce pinpoint the supply of the glitch by evaluating this reminiscence readout with a earlier one to search for discrepancies within the code.
“Utilizing the readout, the workforce has confirmed that about 3% of the FDS reminiscence has been corrupted, stopping the pc from finishing up regular operations,” NASA wrote in its replace.
The engineers are hoping to resolve the difficulty by discovering a manner for FDS to function usually with out the corrupted reminiscence {hardware}, enabling Voyager 1 to start transmitting information concerning the cosmos and proceed its journey via deep house.
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