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One and zero. That’s the love language of computers. This is how NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft communicates with its team on Earth. Voyager 1 is still talking to NASA, but not much after an accident that affected one of its onboard computers.
The computer in question is the flight data system. The FDS is not properly connected to the ship’s communications unit. “As a result, no scientific or engineering information is sent back to the world,” NASA said in a statement on Tuesday. FDS pulls data from Voyager 1’s science instruments and also monitors the health of the spacecraft. That information is sent to the study’s communications unit, known as the TMU, to be sent home.
The Voyager 1 crew sensed trouble when the TMU began sending back a series of ones and zeroes. NASA said it appears the TMU was “found”. Engineers first tried a simple solution: turn it off and on again. The team tried to restart the FDS in the hope that it would return to a working state. It didn’t work. This means that NASA must now engage in a crisis intervention.
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and spent several years exploring our solar system before crossing into space in 2012. The first mission was intended it took four years while the probe visited Jupiter and Saturn. Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 have now completed 46 years in space, making them the longest-lived spacecraft in history. Explorers are returning all the important data on their virtual environment. Sometimes it’s very dramatic, like when Voyager 1 detected the “soft rain” of vibrating interstellar plasma.
There are many challenges in keeping Voyager 1 operational. The spacecraft is far, far away. Sending an order to the browser takes 22.5 hours as the data travels over 15 billion miles. It takes about the same amount of time for Voyager 1 to return a response and for the team to determine whether the command is valid.
Figuring out what order to launch the spacecraft is as much an experiment as it is a science. “Finding solutions to the challenges facing research often requires consulting original papers, ten years old written by engineers who did not consider issues that arise today,” he said. of NASA. With that in mind, the agency said it could take weeks for engineers to come up with a solution to the current problem.
NASA engineers have successfully solved Voyager 1 problems in the past. The spacecraft experienced a computer problem in early 2022 when it began to broadcast malfunctioning data. NASA was able to reprocess the data through a working computer and find it The Voyager 1 mission is back on track.
Voyager 1 is in uncharted territory, both in space and in its operations. The engineers have done an amazing job of continuing the mission, but the ship won’t last forever. This new challenge did not end there; a celebration of Voyager 1’s anniversary and the inevitable adventures that come with it.