NASA’s pioneering Voyager 1 spacecraft has a memory problem. The space agency has been troubleshooting the elderly machine since it began sending back gibberish communications in November. NASA hasn’t fixed Voyager 1 yet, but engineers now know what’s vexing the spacecraft.
The glitch paused Voyager 1’s science work and kicked off a long-distance diagnosis process. The team traced the issue to the flight data subsystem, a computer that talks to the spacecraft’s telemetry modulation unit to send science and engineering data to Earth. The data came back unintelligible. The culprit appears to be a single chip that’s part of the FDS.
The breakthrough came thanks to a “poke” NASA sent in March that prompted Voyager 1 to send back a readout of its FDS memory. “Using the readout, the team has confirmed that about 3% of the FDS memory has been corrupted, preventing the computer from carrying out normal operations,” NASA said in a statement on April 4.
Voyager 1’s position so far away from home creates a lot of challenges when it comes to fixing problems. NASA talks to the spacecraft over a distance of over 15 billion miles. It takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to reach Voyager 1 and it takes an equally long time to receive a response. It’s troubleshooting in slow motion. It also means figuring out the exact cause of the glitch is mostly educated guesswork. It could be damage or it could be a matter of age. “Engineers can’t determine with certainty what caused the issue,” said NASA. “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.”
There’s reason for optimism, though Voyager 1 won’t make a quick recovery. “Although it may take weeks or months, engineers are optimistic they can find a way for the FDS to operate normally without the unusable memory hardware, which would enable Voyager 1 to begin returning science and engineering data again,” NASA said.
Voyager 1 has made an unprecedented journey across space. It launched in 1977 on an initial mission to study our solar system and visit Jupiter and Saturn. That was just the beginning. The resilient spacecraft kept on going and eventually entered interstellar space in 2012. It was the first human-made object to venture into the unexplored territory outside our solar system. Voyager 1’s twin Voyager 2 crossed over into interstellar space in 2018.
NASA turned off some of Voyager 1’s science instruments as the spacecraft aged, but the probe has still been returning valuable data on interstellar space. If a fix works, Voyager 1 will get back into the swing of science and write yet another chapter in an epic story of exploration.
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