Area IT help: After months of doubts, uncertainties, and somber predictions, NASA was lastly in a position to set up communication with Voyager 1’s flight system and assess its standing. The probe remains to be operational as anticipated, and the area company is now getting ready to retrieve new flight knowledge from it.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has confirmed that Voyager 1 stays in good well being. The crew has recognized the difficulty affecting the probe’s capability to transmit invaluable scientific knowledge again to Earth, and engineers are actually working to implement the mandatory repair to reroute communications “round” the malfunctioning chip discovered via “ingenious sleuthing.”
For the primary time since November, Voyager 1 is as soon as once more transmitting usable knowledge concerning the standing of its onboard programs. The legendary probe started transmitting digital gibberish on November 14, 2023, though mission management may nonetheless discern that the spacecraft was receiving their instructions and working usually.
Voyager engineers pinpointed the supply of the difficulty in March 2024 once they found that the probe’s flight knowledge subsystem (FDS) was not functioning as supposed. The FDS, one in every of Voyager’s three onboard “computer systems,” is accountable for packaging scientific and engineering knowledge earlier than transmitting it again to Earth through NASA’s Deep Area Community floor receivers.
One of many chips inside the FDS isn’t functioning, NASA engineers have now found. This chip shops a portion of the FDS reminiscence, together with among the system’s software program code. Nevertheless, NASA can’t bodily exchange it in outer area, billions of kilometers away.
The US area company has devised a plan to relocate the aforementioned code elsewhere inside the FDS system. Nevertheless, the code will should be divided into completely different sections and saved in a number of places inside the FDS. NASA emphasizes that it is a advanced plan, requiring changes to make sure that the code will nonetheless operate as supposed.
Engineers will start the relocation of the affected code within the coming weeks. Following this, Voyager 1 ought to resume sending usable scientific knowledge again to Earth.
The Voyager 1 area probe was launched on September 5, 1977, with a mission to check the outer Photo voltaic System over a span of three to 4 years. After transmitting spectacular photographs and invaluable knowledge about Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn’s moon Titan, Voyager 1 is now journeying via interstellar area past the Solar’s heliosphere.
