NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has resumed transmitting usable data after more than five months of sending gibberish. The 46-year-old interstellar probe is now able to send data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems back to Earth. The last time Voyager 1 sent readable science and engineering data back to Earth was on November 14, 2023.
The cause behind Voyager 1’s nonsensical data was a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the spacecraft’s flight data system (FDS) memory. The FDS collects data from Voyager’s science instruments, as well as engineering data about the health of the spacecraft, and combines them into a single package that’s transmitted to Earth in binary code. However, since the glitch, the mission has been sending data in a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes.
The engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) came up with a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS memory. On April 18, the mission team singled out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data and sent it to its new location. Two days later, the engineers heard back from the Voyager 1 spacecraft. It takes around 22.5 hours to send a radio signal to the spacecraft, and another 22.5 hours to receive one back.
Over the coming weeks, the Voyager 1 team will relocate the other affected portions of the software to different parts of the FDS memory, including portions related to the mission’s science data. This gives hope for the mission to finally be able to resume its normal operations.
Read more at: www.jpl.nasa.gov