NASA engineers have received decodable data from the Voyager 1 spacecraft for the first time in five months, after finally finding a solution to a long-standing communication problem with humanity’s most distant spacecraft, reports CNN among others.
Voyager-1 is now about 24 billion kilometers away, and by the time the structure was 46 years old, it was producing more and more oddities and showing more and more signs of aging.
The most recent problem first appeared last November, when the telemetry modulation unit of the flight data system began sending an indecipherably repeating code pattern.
Voyager–1’s flight data system collects information from the spacecraft’s scientific instruments and combines it with technical data that characterizes the current state of the spacecraft. Ground control receives this data in binary code, i.e. a series of ones and zeros.
However, since November, Voyager-1’s flight data system has been in a kind of loop: the probe has been continuously sending radio signals to ground controllers in recent months, but the signal did not contain usable data.
On April 20, controllers received the first coherent data on the status of Voyager-1’s technical systems. Although the team is still investigating the information, information so far suggests that Voyager 1 is once again healthy and functioning properly.
After the error was discovered, the control team attempted to send commands to reboot the spacecraft’s computer system to learn more about the root cause of the problem. On March 1, the team sent the “poke” command to Voyager 1 to get the spacecraft to run different software to see if the cause of the error could be found.
Two days later, data arrived that stood out from the rest of the confusing data. Although the signal was not in the format the Voyager crew was used to when the flight data system was operating normally, NASA engineers were able to decode it. The decoded signal contained a “read” of the entire flight data system memory.
Based on this, the team determined the cause of the problem: 3% of the memory of the flight data system was damaged. A single chip is malfunctioning, the one responsible for storing some of the system’s memory, including some of the computer’s software code. The cause of the chip’s failure is unknown, but according to the team, it could have worn out or been hit by a particle from space.
Originally planned for five years, Voyager-1 and its twin, Voyager-2, were launched in 1977, the two Voyagers being the longest-running spacecraft.
