NASA’s decades-old Voyager 1 spacecraft has begun sending readable communications again after months of transmitting gibberish.
Voyager 1 has been sending data from interstellar space to Earth for almost fifty years after its launch in 1977.
However, a technical problem occurred in November that made the spacecraft’s data about its environment and the health of its own systems unintelligible to the NASA scientists monitoring it.
Then, on April 20, Voyager 1, which began by visiting Jupiter and Saturn before venturing further into space, returned readable communications, confirming that it is still safely cruising through outer space.
NASA’s official Twitter account for the spacecraft posted a joyful tweet in celebration: ‘Hello, it’s me. -V1’.
NASA’s decades-old Voyager 1 spacecraft has begun sending readable communications again after months of transmitting gibberish.
The account also shared a tweet from the official NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory account showing an image of elated scientists clapping with joy at the latest Voyager 1 data set.
“Sounds a little more like you, #Voyager1,” the account wrote.
“For the first time since November, Voyager 1 provides usable data on the health and status of its onboard engineering systems,” he explained.
Adding: “Next step: allow the spacecraft to begin returning scientific data again.”
Voyager’s flight team traced the November problem to a malfunction of a single chip in the flight data subsystem, the part responsible for sending its data back to Earth.
The broken chip contained some of the computer code needed to transmit viable data.
“The loss of that code left scientific and engineering data unusable,” NASA said in a statement Monday.
“Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory,” the agency explained.
Photograph taken by the Voyager 1 spacecraft: As part of NASA’s mission in the summer of 1977, two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, identical in every detail, were launched within 15 days of each other.
The distance makes troubleshooting problems on the ship a challenge.
Voyager is now so far from Earth that it takes a signal twenty-two and a half hours to cover the 24 billion kilometers.
However, the team’s code experiment worked and the data began to be readable once again.
“Finding solutions to the challenges facing probes often involves consulting decades-old original documents written by engineers who did not anticipate the problems emerging today,” NASA said in December after the discovery of the problem.
“Over the next few weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected parts of the FDS software,” NASA said in its statement updated Monday.
Adding: “These include the parts that will begin to return scientific data.”
Voyager was the first man-made object to leave our solar system and enter the space between the stars.
The radio antenna, which protrudes from the central circular dish like the antenna of a robotic insect, is equally archaic, emitting as many watts as a refrigerator light bulb.
NASA had recognized that the powerful Voyager mission cannot continue forever.
However, the team hopes to maintain the instruments necessary to transmit data about its environment until at least 2025.
He also hopes that the spacecraft will continue traveling through space and that NASA will be able to track its whereabouts until around 2036, when its nuclear batteries will likely run out, after which it will continue to drift aimlessly.
In fact, some of the systems are becoming obsolete. For starters, their internal computers have 240,000 times less memory than an iPhone.
The radio antenna, which protrudes from the central circular dish like the antenna of a robotic insect, is equally archaic, emitting as many watts as a refrigerator light bulb.
As for the on-board recorder, which is constantly on, it differs little from that of a typical car from the 70s.