After four interesting months, NASA finally received an understandable signal from its Voyager 1 spacecraft.
Since November 2023, the nearly 50-year-old spacecraft has been having trouble with its onboard computers. Although Voyager 1, one of NASA's longest-lived space missions, has been transmitting a stable radio signal to Earth, it has not yet done so. Contains no usable dataWhich baffled scientists.
Now, in response to the command prompt, or “poke,” sent from Earth on March 1, NASA has received a new signal from Voyager 1 that engineers have been able to decipher. Mission scientists hope this information will help explain the spacecraft's recent communication problems.
NASA said in a report: “The source of the problem appears to be one of the three on-board computers, the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), which is responsible for filling in scientific and engineering data before sending it to Earth by the telemetry modulation unit.” Blog post Wednesday (March 13).
Related: NASA's 46-year-old Voyager 1 probe is no longer transmitting data
On March 1, as part of an effort to find a solution to Voyager 1's computer problems, NASA sent an order to the spacecraft's Defense and Security Directorate, requiring it to use different sequences in its software package, effectively circumventing any data that might be corrupt.
Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth. This means that any radio signals sent from our planet take 22.5 hours to reach the spacecraft, with any response taking the same time to be picked up by antennas on Earth.
On March 3, NASA detected activity from one section of the FDS that differed from the “stream of unreadable data” they had previously been receiving. Four days later, engineers began the heavy task of trying to decode this signal. By March 10, the team discovered that the signal contained a readout of the entire FDS memory. This included instructions on what the FDS was to do, any values in its code that could be changed depending on NASA commands or the status of the spacecraft, and downloadable scientific or engineering data.
Voyager 1 has ventured farther from Earth Anything else is man-made. It was launched in 1977, Within weeks of its twin spacecraftVoyager 2. The mission's initial goal was exploration Jupiter And Saturn. However, after nearly five decades, and with countless discoveries, the mission continues beyond the borders of the world Solar System.
NASA scientists will now “compare this reading to the one that appeared before the problem arose and look for inconsistencies in the code and variables to find the source of the ongoing problem,” they said in a blog post.
However, NASA emphasized that it will take some time to determine whether any of the insights gained from this new signal can be used to solve Voyager 1's long-standing communication problems.
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