NASA manages to fix this with an ingenious software update.
Hands raised, applause, smiles from ear to ear. These are some of the reactions of the Voyager probe team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory after receiving readable data from the Voyager 1 spacecraft for the first time in five months.
Five intense months. For the first time since November, the Voyager 1 space probe, the farthest man-made object from Earth, is sending back engineering data with readable information about its performance and the state of its systems.
After increasingly desperate attempts to fix the probe, members of the Voyager flight team celebrated the good news Friday in a Pasadena conference room, NASA now says.
One step away from achieving the feat. Although the probe is once again sending back data on its health, NASA has yet to complete a software update so it can once again send us science data from interstellar space, where it resides with its twin sister Voyager 2.
The Voyager 1 spacecraft began sending meaningless data to Earth on November 14, 2023. Until March, NASA engineers could not confirm the cause of the problem. One of the three computers on board the probe, the flight data subsystem (FDS), responsible for packaging scientific and engineering data, failed.
The rescue. After sending a series of clever commands to the spacecraft, which takes almost a full day to respond 15 billion miles away from Earth, the mission team discovered that a single memory chip was responsible for storing the corrupted portion of the FDS code. The chip had deteriorated, possibly due to age, and the code no longer worked correctly.
As a solution, the team decided to move the affected code to a different location in FDS memory. However, the ship only has a few kilobytes of memory, and there is no space large enough to hold all the original source code. NASA’s plan was to split the code into sections and store those sections in different areas of the FDS.
Now what. NASA had to adjust sections of the code to make the system work as a whole. He also had to update all references to the location of this code elsewhere in FDS memory through new software updates.
The team started by changing the location of the code responsible for packaging the ship’s engineering data. The code was sent to the new location on April 18th. When Voyager 1 returned readable data on April 20, NASA confirmed that the idea had worked.
For the first time in five months, Voyager 1 engineers will be able to check the serviceability and condition of the spacecraft. Now they will have to repeat this step with the part of the code that processes scientific data so that the ship can continue to function normally 47 years after launch.
Images | POT
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