For the first time after five months of problems, NASA engineers received data readings from Voyager 1 thanks to an initiative to fix communication problems on the spacecraft farthest from Earth.
NASA’s Voyager 1 interstellar probe communicates back to ground control with meaningful data. On April 20, Voyager 1 updated the ship’s operating status after 5 months of problems. While the spacecraft has yet to send useful scientific data back to Earth, it is now transmitting usable information about its onboard technical systems, according to Space.
On November 14, 2023, after 11 years of exploring interstellar space and 24 billion km from Earth, Voyager 1’s binary code, a computer language consisting of 1s and 0s, is used to communicate with the control team. flying at NASA, becomes meaningless. In March 2024, the Voyager 1 control team sent a digital signal to the spacecraft, stimulating the flight data subsystem (FDS) to send back full memory information, helping scientists and engineers found that the persistent glitch resulted from a corrupted code on a chip that accounts for about 3% of FDS memory. The loss of this code rendered Voyager 1’s scientific and technical data unusable.
Of course, the NASA team can’t directly repair or replace the chip, but they can place the affected code elsewhere in remote FDS memory. Although no part of memory is large enough to hold the entire code, they can divide it into chunks and store them separately. To do this, they will need to adjust the storage components to ensure that adding broken code does not cause them to stop working or cooperate with each other. Additionally, NASA personnel should also update any references to the location of the failed code.
On April 18, 2024, the team in charge began sending code to the new location in FDS memory. This is a meticulous process because the radio signal takes 22.5 hours to travel between Earth and Voyager 1, and then another 22.5 hours to receive the signal transmitted back from the spacecraft. However, on April 20, the team in charge confirmed that their edit was effective. For the first time in a long time, scientists were able to contact Voyager 1 and check its status. Over the next few weeks, the team will work to adapt the rest of the FDS software, restoring areas of the system responsible for packaging and transferring important scientific data from the ship.
37 years after launch in 1977, Voyager 1 became an artificial object leaving the solar system and entering interstellar space. Voyager 2 followed it and flew into interstellar space 6 years later, in 2018. Voyager still works well and communicates with Earth. These two spacecraft are the only man-made objects that explore space beyond the Sun’s influence.