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Engineers have sent a “pocket” to the Voyager 1 probe and received a potentially encouraging response as they hope to resolve a communication issue with the aging spacecraft that lasted for five months.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, are venturing through uncharted cosmic territory along the reach of the outer solar system.
Although Voyager 1 continued to transmit a steady radio signal to its mission control team on Earth, that signal has not carried any usable data since November, indicating a problem with one of the three computers on board the spacecraft.
A new signal recently received from the spacecraft suggests that NASA’s mission team may be making progress in their quest to understand what Voyager 1 is. Voyager 1 is currently the farthest spacecraft from Earth at about 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away.
Meanwhile, Voyager 2 has traveled more than 12.6 billion miles (20.3 billion kilometers) from our planet. Both are in interstellar space and are the only spacecraft ever to operate beyond the heliosphere, the Sun’s bubble of magnetic fields and particles that extends far beyond Pluto’s orbit.
Originally conceived over the past five years, the Voyager probes are the two longest-running spacecraft in history. Their extremely long life spans mean that both spacecraft have provided further insights into our solar system and beyond after reaching their initial targets of flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune decades from now. shin.
But both quests face challenges as they age.
Cosmic communication breakdown
The mission team first noticed the communication issue with Voyager 1 on November 14, 2023, when the telemetry modulation unit of the flight data system began sending a repeating pattern of codes.
Voyager 1’s flight data system collects information from the spacecraft’s science instruments and bundles it with engineering data that indicates Voyager 1’s current health status. Mission control on Earth receives that data in binary code, or a series of ones and zeros.
But since November, Voyager 1’s flight data system has been stuck in a loop.
The spacecraft can still receive and carry out commands transmitted from the mission team, but a problem with that telecommunications unit did not cause any scientific or engineering data from Voyager 1 to be transmitted to Earth.
Since the issue was discovered, the mission team has attempted to send commands to restart the computer system and learn more about the root cause of the issue.
The team sent a command, known as a “poke,” to Voyager 1 on March 1 to cause the flight data system to run different software sequences in case some sort of glitch was causing the issue.
On March 3, the team noticed that activity from one part of the flight data system stood out from the rest of the garbled data. Although the signal was not in the format the Voyager crew is used to when the flight data system is operating as expected, an engineer with NASA’s Deep Space Network was able to decode it.
The Deep Space Network is a system of radio antennas on Earth that helps the agency communicate with the Voyager probes and other spacecraft exploring our solar system.
The decoded signal included a readout of the entire flight data system memory, according to an update shared by NASA.
“The (flight data system) memory includes its code, or instructions about what to do, as well as variables, or values used in the code that can be changed based on commands or the status of the spacecraft,” according to a NASA blog post . “There is also scientific or engineering data for downlink. The team will compare this reading to the one that came down before the issue occurred and look for inconsistencies in the code and variables to find the source of the ongoing issue.”
How the Voyager probes keep going
Voyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft. In addition, the team has to wait 45 hours to get a response. Currently, the team is analyzing Voyager 1’s memory readout after starting the decoding process on March 7 and arriving at the readout three days later.
“It will take a lot of time to use that information to come up with a possible solution and try to implement it,” says the space agency.
The last time Voyager 1 suffered a similar issue with the flight data system was in 1981, and the current problem does not appear to be related to other glitches the spacecraft has had in recent years.
Over time, both spacecraft have encountered unexpected issues and crashes, including a seven-month period in 2020 when Voyager 2 was unable to communicate with Earth. In August 2023, the mission team used a long-shot “smile” technique to re-establish communications with Voyager 2 after the spacecraft’s antenna command was inadvertently pointed in the wrong direction.
As the twin aging Voyager probes continue to explore the cosmos, the team has slowly turned off instruments on these “senior citizens” to conserve power and extend their missions, a project manager said Voyager, Suzanne Dodd, formerly of CNN.
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