How NASA regained contact with Voyager 1, the spacecraft that has traveled further than any other

In the vastness of space, in what man does not know, there is something created by his hands It has become the furthest he has traveled from Earth.

This is the probe Voyager 1located exactly At 24,000 million km It continues to move away every second, and is now traveling outside our solar system. At a speed of about 61,500 kilometers per hour.

Thirty-five years after its launch in 1977, Voyager 1 made its operators at NASA very nervous, as it lost contact with our planet at the end of last year. Or rather, he was still in touch, but with Messages that could not be deciphered And meaningless, as a result of a malfunction or failure of their computer.

It was exactly on November 14, 2023, after 11 years of interstellar space exploration and at an astonishing distance of 24 billion kilometers from Earth, when… Spaceship binary code, a computer language consisting of zeros and ones that you use to communicate, It stopped making sense To mission specialists who control it and send it various commands.

NASA worked for 5 months to solve the problem With one of the three computers on board the old Voyager 1 interstellar spacecraft, called the Flight Data System (FDS), not communicating properly with one of the probe’s subsystems, called the Telecommunications Unit (TMU).

The fact is that, according to experts, the FDS is designed to collect data from scientific instruments, as well as engineering data on the health and condition of the spacecraft. Then combine this information into one file A “packet” of data that the TMU sends back to Earth. Data is in the form of ones and zeros, or binary code. Variable sets of two numbers are the basis of all computer languages.

In November, the TMU began transmitting a recurring pattern of ones and zeros as if it was “stuck.” After ruling out other possibilitiesThe Voyager team determined that the source of the problem was FDS. Engineers tried to restart FDS several times and return it to the state it was in before the problem began, but the spacecraft did not return any usable data.

It took the engineers several weeks Develop a new plan to solve the problem. Finding solutions to challenges faced in investigations often requires counseling Original documents from decades ago Written by engineers who did not anticipate the problems that arise today.

In addition, it takes 22.5 hours for commands from mission controllers on Earth to reach Voyager 1, which explores the outer regions of our solar system. this means The engineering team had to wait 45 hours for a response from Voyager 1 to determine if the command had the desired result.

But on April 20, the spacecraft and its twin Voyager 2, the two longest-operating spacecraft in history, began sending meaningful, decodeable messages. “Voyager 1 provides usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems,” NASA said in a statement.

in March, NASA’s Voyager 1 operating team sent a digital “push” to the spacecraft space, causing the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS) to send an entire readable memory to Earth.

This memory dump revealed to scientists and engineers that the “bug” is the result of a code change located in a single chip representing about 3% of FDS memory. The loss of this code left Voyager 1’s scientific and engineering data unusable for 5 months.

Yes good The NASA team can’t physically repair or replace this chip, what they did was place the affected code remotely somewhere else in FDS memory. Although there is no section of memory large enough to contain this entire code, the team was able to divide it into sections and store these parts separately.

To do this, you also had to adjust the relevant storage partitions to ensure that adding this corrupt code did not cause those areas to stop working individually or together as a whole. In addition, NASA personnel also had to ensure that any references to the location of the revised code were updated.

On April 18, 2024, the team began sending the code to its new location in FDS memory. This was an arduous process, as it took 22.5 hours for a radio signal to travel the distance between Earth and Voyager 1, and then another 22.5 hours to receive a signal from the spacecraft.

but, On Saturday, April 20, the team confirmed that the modification it made had succeeded. For the first time in five months, scientists were able to communicate with Voyager 1 and check its condition. Over the next few weeks, the team will fine-tune the rest of the FDS program and will aim to recover regions of the system responsible for packaging and returning vital scientific data from beyond the boundaries of the solar system.

Apparently, Corrosion on the chip prevented data system computers from accessing a vital part of the program code Used to encapsulate information, for later transmission to Earth. NASA said the issue was resolved by changing the affected code to different locations in the probe’s computer memory.

Also fortunately, Voyager 2 is still working and communicating well with Earth. The two spacecraft remain the only man-made objects that explore space outside the influence of the Sun.

The space probe has advanced beyond the bubble of gas emanating from the Sun, an area known as the heliosphere. That happened in 2012, and they are now traveling in interstellar space, which contains the gas, dust and magnetic fields of other stars.

Voyager 1 It left Earth on September 5, 1977, a few days after the launch of its sister spacecraft, Voyager 2.

The main goal of the twin spacecraft was to study the planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, a mission they completed in 1989. They were then transported into deep space, towards the center of our galaxy.

voyager 2, Which flew over Uranus and Neptune, continues to work normally after having already traveled more than 20.3 billion kilometers from our planet.