NASA scientists receive the first message from the Voyager-1 in 5 months. Since November 2023 NASA’s Voyager-1 has faced glitches in its onboard computer but now the Voyager-1 scientists team has resolved the bug. Voyager-1 is humanity’s most distant spacecraft ever reached.
Voyager-1 was launched on Mon, 05 Sept 1977 12:56:00 UTC. Currently, Voyager-1 is in the constellation of Ophiuchus reached interstellar space at a distance of 24,328,551,946 kilometers from Earth.
Spacecraft’s first issue was detected in November 2023, the issue began after sending unclear and non-recognizable data. Voyager-1 Mission control on Earth receives all data in binary codes means a series of ones and zeros.
An issue arises from the Flight data system’s telemetry modulation unit. FDS is responsible for sending all data to the Deep Space Network mission control. Since November scientists have been working on this issue but they didn’t get a solution. But on April 20, 2024 scientists successfully received the first coherent data about the health and status of Voyager 1.
What was the problem in Voyager-1?
On March 1, 2024, scientists sent a command called ‘poke’ to the Voyager-1 to know what was causing the glitch. The scientist team discovered on March 3 that certain flight data system behavior was distinct from the other jumbled data. An engineer with NASA’s Deep Space Network decoded the signal, even though it wasn’t in the format the Voyager crew is used to seeing when the flight data system is operating as planned.
The received decoded signals include the entire FDS (Flight Data System’s) memory. The cause of the issue is 3% of the flight data system’s memory is corrupted. One chip, that carries a portion of the computer’s software code and the system’s memory, isn’t functioning correctly. The scientists stated that although the reason for the chip’s failure is unknown, it may have been damaged by an energetic particle from space or simply worn out.
On April 18, engineers received a radio signal from the probe instructing it to move the code to a different position in the system’s memory after figuring out the code required for packing Voyager 1’s engineering data.
A radio signal must travel 22.5 hours to reach Voyager 1 due to its great distance from Earth, and a return signal from the spacecraft must travel a further 22.5 hours to reach Earth.
The crew was able to obtain usable engineering data from the probe once more when they successfully modified the code, as evidenced by the answer from Voyager 1 on April 20.
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