NASA engineers have discovered the source of Voyager 1’s mysterious glitch, which left it sending back a repeating pattern of 1s and 0s rather than useful data.
Voyager 1 has traveled further than any human-made object, crossing the heliopause and heading into interstellar space. While doing this, it has continued to send back useful data to Earth, helping us learn about the space between stars outside of our own Solar System. All this while working with just 69.63 kilobytes of memory, and running partly on code originally written in the archaic computer language Fortran 5.
“The button you press to open the door of your car, that has more compute power than the Voyager spacecrafts do,” Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd explained to NPR. “It’s remarkable that they keep flying, and that they’ve flown for 46-plus years.”
With such a mission, you’d expect the occasional challenge, even before you take into account the high radiation environment it is heading through.
“In September 2023, an issue arose with the data coming back from Voyager 1. Normally transmitted in binary code, or a series of 0s and 1s representing words, the probe was instead sending only alternating 1s and 0s. Effectively, the call between the spacecraft and the Earth was still connected, but Voyager’s ‘voice’ was replaced with a monotonous dial tone,” the NASA Voyager engineering team explained to IFLScience in February.
“Because of this issue, scientists are not receiving any science data or updates about the probe’s health and status, including information that might reveal the source of the problem. Through various indirect means, the team has concluded that the issue is most likely with the Flight Data System [FDS], one of the probe’s onboard computers. The team is working hard to resolve the issue, but this process may take months.”
In March, NASA sent a “poke” command to Voyager 1, prompting it to send back a readout of the FDS memory, as well as other variables in the software. From this, they found that around 3 percent of its memory has become corrupted, likely the result of a single chip in the probe ceasing to function.
“Engineers can’t determine with certainty what caused the issue,” NASA explained in a statement. “Two possibilities are that the chip could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or that it simply may have worn out after 46 years.”
The team is up against time pressure, as the plutonium-powered system that powers the craft is running out of juice. In a few years, they may have to shut down science instruments one by one to keep it chugging along.
However, the team is optimistic that they will be able to fix the issue in the coming weeks and months, allowing the probe to send back useful science data once more.
Source Link: NASA Discovers Cause Of Repeating Pattern Sent Back By Voyager 1
