'Welcome Voyager!' Celebrated Spacecraft Is Back, Transmitting From 15 Billion Miles Away After NASA Repairs it.
After falling black last year, a NASA spacecraft that was launched almost 50 years ago is now returning data to scientists, the space agency announced this week. NASA said in a news statement on April 22 that a group of specialists has remotely fixed Voyager 1, a spacecraft that was launched in 1977 to explore planets and moons beyond our solar system and is currently located more than 15 billion miles from Earth, to solve a computer issue. The only two artificially constructed spacecraft that travel into interstellar space are Voyager 1 and 2. Up until five months ago, both spacecraft, which were initially intended to survive for five years, have been sending information back to Earth for almost 46 years. Voyager 1 stopped sending usable data in November 2023, at which point NASA lost communication with the probe. The agency reported that the probe was still receiving orders from mission control and was functioning correctly despite the distorted incoming information. The flight data subsystem of the probe, one of the spacecraft's three onboard computers, had a defective chip, which the technical team of Voyager 1 identified as the source of the issue. Voyager 1's flight data subsystem code was impacted by the chip problem, which the agency claimed "rendered the science and engineering data unusable." Since the chip could not be fixed remotely, engineers devised a strategy to disperse the compromised code among the flight data subsystem's unaffected areas. Happy Faces In the Frame After A Heated Process ~ (Source: Google Images) Further Details On The Entire Plan ~ The JPL team found that a single chip that held some of the flight data subsystem (FDS) memory—including some software code for the FDS computer—wasn't functioning and still isn't. That code was lost, making the data from science and engineering useless. The team chose to relocate the impacted code to another location in the FDS memory after failing to fix the chip. However, no one site can accommodate the complete code section. They thus came up with a strategy to split the impacted code into portions and put each section in a distinct location within the FDS. They also had to modify certain code parts so that, they still worked as a unit for this strategy to succeed. It was also necessary to update any references in other areas of the FDS memory that pointed to the location of that code. On April 18, once they had resolved all the issues, they transmitted the updated code to its new place in the FDS memory. At a distance of about 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers), a radio signal takes roughly 22 and a half hours to reach Voyager 1, and it takes an additional 22 and a half hours for a signal to return to Earth. The mission flight crew discovered that the adjustment was successful when they received a response from the spacecraft on April 20: They could now monitor the spacecraft's condition and health for the first time in the last five months. NASA said that on April 20, Voyager 1 started sending data on the condition and state of its systems once more. The flight data subsystem will undergo "relocation and adjustment of the other affected portions" in the upcoming weeks, according to the agency, including "the portions that will start returning science data." Even Voyager's surviving scientific equipment, which allows it to research the nature of magnetic fields and cosmic rays in interstellar space, may need to be turned off in a year or maybe even less. The probe will leave the Deep Space Network and be out of reach of any communications by 2036
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