For the previous 5 months, the Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending a gradual stream of unreadable gibberish again to Earth. Now, NASA engineers lastly know why.
The 46-year-old spacecraft sends common radio indicators because it drifts farther from our photo voltaic system. However in November 2023, the indicators instantly grew to become garbled, that means scientists had been unable to learn any of its information, they usually had been left mystified in regards to the fault’s origins.
In March, NASA engineers despatched a command immediate, or “poke,” to the craft to get a readout from its flight information subsystem (FDS) — which packages Voyager 1’s science and engineering information earlier than beaming it again to Earth.
After decoding the spacecraft’s response, the engineers have discovered the supply of the issue: The FDS’s reminiscence has been corrupted.
Associated: NASA’s Voyager 1 sends readable message to Earth after 4 nail-biting months of gibberish
“The group suspects {that a} single chip chargeable for storing a part of the affected portion of the FDS reminiscence is not working,” NASA stated in a weblog submit Wednesday (March 13). “Engineers cannot decide with certainty what brought about the difficulty. Two prospects are that the chip might have been hit by an brisk particle from area or that it merely could have worn out after 46 years.”
Though it could take a number of months, the engineers say they will discover a workaround to run the FDS with out the fried chip — restoring the spacecraft’s messaging output and enabling it to proceed to ship readable data from exterior our photo voltaic system.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 zipped previous Saturn and Jupiter in 1979 and 1980 earlier than flying out into interstellar area in 2012. It’s now recording the situations exterior of the solar’s protecting magnetic subject, or heliosphere, which blankets our photo voltaic system.
Voyager 1 is at the moment greater than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and it takes 22.5 hours for any radio sign to journey from the craft to our planet.
