NASA’s Voyager 1 finally makes sense after months of broadcast gibberish

The Voyager 1 spacecraft has transmitted useful data for the first time in more than five months, raising hopes that the 46-year-old mission can finally resume normal operations.

NASA’s beloved interstellar probe transmitted data on the status and health of its onboard engineering systems to Mission Control on Saturday, the space agency said. Announced. This is great news for the mission, and we hope Voyager 1’s next step is to start returning science data again.

Voyager 1 last sent readable science and engineering data back to Earth on November 14, 2023. After this, the spacecraft received commands, but answering Earth with useless gibberish. The historic spacecraft is exploring the extreme edge of the Sun’s region, combining its observations with data from recent missions to better understand how the heliosphere interacts with interstellar space.

Related article: Voyager probes discover previously unknown phenomenon in deep space

In March, a team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) identified the reason for Voyager 1’s meaningless data– One chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the spacecraft’s flight data system (FDS) memory.

The FDS collects data from Voyager’s science instruments as well as engineering data about the spacecraft’s health and combines it into a single packet that is transmitted back to Earth in binary code. However, after the failure, the mission sent back data in a repeating pattern of zeros and zeros.

Voyager 1 is 15.14 billion miles away, making repairs much more difficult. JPL engineers knew they couldn’t fix the chip, but they could try to place the corrupted code elsewhere in the FDS memory.

Instead of choosing one location to store all the affected code, the team came up with a plan to split it into sections and store those sections in different locations in the FDS. On April 18, the mission team isolated the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data and sent it to a new location.

Two days later, engineers received a response from the Voyager 1 spacecraft. It takes about 22.5 hours to send a radio signal to the spacecraft, and another 22.5 hours to receive a response.

Over the next few weeks, the Voyager 1 team will move other affected pieces of software to different parts of the FDS memory. including portions related to mission science data.

Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, less than a month after its sister probe Voyager 2 began its journey into space. It launched into interstellar space in August 2012, becoming the first spacecraft to leave the heliosphere. The twin spacecraft is the longest mission in history, and aside from some communication hiccups, the couple is doing well for their age.

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