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NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft suffered a computer glitch that caused a communication breakdown between the 46-year-old explorer and its mission team on Earth.
Engineers are currently trying to resolve the issue as the aging spacecraft explores uncharted cosmic territory along the reaches of the solar system.
Voyager 1 is currently the farthest spacecraft from Earth at about 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away, and its twin Voyager 2 has traveled more than 12 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) from our planet. Both are in interstellar space and are the only spacecraft that have ever operated 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 long, very long lifetimes mean that both spacecraft have provided further insights into our solar system and beyond after reaching their initial targets, flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune decades ago. .
But their unexpected long journey was not without challenges.
Voyager 1 has three computers on board, including a flight data system that collects information from the spacecraft’s science instruments and combines it with engineering data that shows Voyager 1’s current health status. Mission control on Earth receives that data in code. binary, or in series. of ones and zeros.
But Voyager 1’s flight data system now appears to be stuck on auto-repeat, in a situation reminiscent of the movie “Groundhog Day.”
A long-distance glitch
The mission team first noticed the issue on Nov. 14, when the flight data system’s telecommunications unit began sending back a repetitive pattern of ones and zeros, as if it was stuck in a loop.
Although the spacecraft can still receive and carry out commands transmitted from the mission team, a problem with that telecommunications unit means that no science or engineering data from Voyager 1 is being sent back to Earth.
The Voyager crew sent commands to the spacecraft over the weekend to restart the flight data system, but no usable data has yet come back, according to NASA.
NASA engineers are trying to gather more information about the root cause of the issue before deciding the next steps to correct it, said Calla Cofield, a media relations specialist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which manages the mission. The process could take weeks.
Voyager 1 last experienced a similar problem with the flight data system in 1981, and the current problem does not appear to be related to other glitches experienced by the spacecraft in recent years, Cofield said. .
As the two Voyager probes face new challenges, mission crew members have only the original manuals written decades ago to consult, and they could not contain the challenges facing the spacecraft. count as they get older.
The Voyager team is trying to consider all the possible implications before sending more commands to the spacecraft to ensure that its operations are not unexpectedly disrupted.
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.
Keeping the Voyager probes alive
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.
Along the way, both spacecraft encountered issues and unexpected setbacks, including a seven-month period in 2020 when Voyager 2 was unable to communicate with Earth. In August, 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.
While the team hopes to restore the regular stream of data sent back by Voyager 1, the main value of the mission lies in its longevity, Cofield said. For example, scientists want to see how particles and magnetic fields change as the probes fly further away from the heliosphere. But that data set will be incomplete if Voyager 1 cannot return information as it continues.
The mission team has been creative with its strategies to expand the power supply on both spacecraft in recent years to allow their excellent missions to continue.
“The Voyagers are performing far, far beyond their primary missions and beyond any other spacecraft in history,” Cofield said. “So while the engineering team is working hard to keep them alive, we also fully expect issues to arise.”
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