PASADENA, Calif. — After 5 months, NASA lastly has a solution to what went flawed with the Voyager 1 spacecraft. Since November 2023, the well-known area probe has been sending unusual, nonsensical alerts again to Earth. So, what occurred? Did the probe encounter one thing incomprehensible out in deep area? Effectively, it’s so much less complicated than that — a single laptop chip has gone haywire.
Voyager 1 is now 46 years-old. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the one spacecraft in human historical past to journey into interstellar area — the void between star methods. Furthermore, Voyager 1 is at present over 15 billion miles from Earth, making easy repairs a monumental enterprise.
So, when the spacecraft began sending again gibberish on Nov. 14, 2023, there was no straightforward repair — like going to the Apple retailer and shopping for a brand new probe. NASA needed to observe down the supply of the unusual alerts to its supply. A workforce on the company’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California lastly found out why Voyager 1 was now not sending usable information concerning the well being and standing of its laptop methods.
No, the reply wasn’t aliens — the issue centered round one of many probe’s three onboard computer systems, referred to as the flight information subsystem (FDS). This method is liable for packaging all of the scientific information Voyager gathers earlier than the probe sends it again to Earth. It seems {that a} single laptop chip that shops a part of this FDS reminiscence is now not working contained in the 46-year-old spacecraft.
So, what’s the influence of shedding one tiny laptop chip in a probe as massive as Voyager 1? Effectively, that chip held a portion of the FDS laptop’s software program code, which means the probe might now not ship again readable info from area.
Since NASA couldn’t substitute the chip, they devised an ingenious answer: add the code to a unique a part of Voyager 1. Nevertheless, there was one drawback: the spacecraft didn’t have a pc part sufficiently big to retailer the alternative code — solely that damaged chip carried the mandatory area.
So, the workforce at JPL broke the code up into smaller segments and sprinkled it all through the Voyager 1 FDS laptop system. This additionally meant adjusting that important code to nonetheless operate as one program as soon as all the items reached Voyager 15 billion miles away.
Fortunately, the plan labored. After beaming the brand new code into area on April 18, 2024, NASA obtained a readable sign from Voyager 1 on April 20. Researchers be aware that Voyager is so distant from Earth now that it takes over 22 hours simply to speak to the spacecraft and one other 22 hours for Voyager 1 to ship a reply. Scientists are actually engaged on fixing different parts of the FDS, so Voyager 1 can start sending again detailed readings of interstellar area.
So, after a five-month trip, scientists say people can as soon as once more count on new information to return from each Voyager probes as they journey previous the outer planets of the photo voltaic system right into a mysterious area of area the place nobody has gone earlier than.
