The Voyager 1 spacecraft returned usable knowledge for the primary time in additional than 5 months, giving hope for the 46-year-old mission to lastly be capable to resume its regular operations.
NASA’s favourite interstellar probe transmitted knowledge concerning the well being and standing of its onboard engineering techniques to mission management on Saturday, the area company introduced. That’s nice information for the mission, and the following step is hopefully for Voyager 1 to start returning science knowledge once more.
The final time Voyager 1 despatched readable science and engineering knowledge again to Earth was on November 14, 2023. Afterwards, the spacecraft was receiving instructions, however speaking again to Earth in unusable gibberish. The storied spacecraft is exploring the outermost fringe of the Solar’s area, combining its observations with knowledge from newer missions to get a greater understanding of how the heliosphere interacts with interstellar area.
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In March, the staff at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) pinpointed the trigger behind Voyager 1’s nonsensical knowledge: a single chip chargeable for storing a part of the affected portion of the spacecraft’s flight knowledge system (FDS) reminiscence.
FDS collects knowledge from Voyager’s science devices, in addition to engineering knowledge concerning the well being of the spacecraft, and combines them right into a single package deal that’s transmitted to Earth in binary code. Because the glitch, nonetheless, the mission has been sending knowledge in a repeating sample of ones and zeroes.
Voyager 1 is 15.14 billion miles away, which makes repairing it that rather more difficult. The engineers at JPL knew that they couldn’t repair the chip, however they might attempt to place the affected code elsewhere within the FDS reminiscence.
As an alternative of choosing a single location to carry all the affected code, the staff got here up with a plan to divide it into sections and retailer these sections somewhere else within the FDS. On April 18, the mission staff singled out the code chargeable for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering knowledge and despatched it to its new location.
Two days later, the engineers heard again from the Voyager 1 spacecraft. It takes round 22.5 hours to ship a radio sign to the spacecraft, and one other 22.5 hours to obtain one again.
Over the approaching weeks, the Voyager 1 staff will relocate the opposite affected parts of the software program to completely different elements of the FDS reminiscence, together with parts associated to the mission’s science knowledge.
Voyager 1 launched in 1977, lower than a month after its twin probe, Voyager 2, started its personal journey to area. The probe ventured into interstellar area in August 2012, turning into the primary spacecraft to depart the heliosphere. The dual spacecraft are the longest-running missions in historical past, and except for a couple of communication glitches, the pair are doing fairly effectively for his or her age.
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