Final November, one in every of NASA’s most well-known craft, Voyager 1, stopped transmitting messages to the nice nervousness of these answerable for receiving them.
It wasn’t all stress although, as a result of mission controllers might inform the spacecraft was nonetheless receiving their instructions and in any other case working usually.
Now nonetheless, essentially the most distant object from the Earth made by people is once more sending knowledge on the well being and standing of its onboard engineering methods because it drifts by interstellar area.
It’s been 46 years and seven months since Voyager 1 left Earth, and 11 years and eight months because it bade Pluto farewell and left our photo voltaic system.
In March 2024, mission management for Voyager 1 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory at California Technical Institute, managed to hone in on the difficulty that was stopping two-way communication with the probe.
The workforce at JPL found {that a} single chip answerable for storing a portion of the flight knowledge subsystem (FDS) reminiscence—together with a few of the FDS laptop’s software program code—wasn’t, and nonetheless isn’t, working anymore.
The lack of that code rendered the science and engineering knowledge unusable. Unable to restore the chip, the workforce determined to position the affected code elsewhere within the FDS reminiscence. However no single location is giant sufficient to carry the part of code in its entirety.
In order that they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and retailer these sections in other places within the FDS. To make this plan work, additionally they wanted to regulate these code sections to make sure, for instance, that all of them nonetheless operate as a complete. Any references to the situation of that code in different components of the FDS reminiscence wanted to be up to date as properly.
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As soon as that they had every thing sorted out, they despatched the modified code to its new location within the FDS reminiscence on April 18th. A radio sign takes about 22 ½ hours to achieve Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and one other 22 ½ hours for a sign to come back again to Earth.
When the mission flight workforce heard again from the spacecraft on April twentieth, they noticed that the modification labored: For the primary time in 5 months, they have been in a position to test the well being and standing of the spacecraft.
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Of the remaining scientific devices on board, Voyager can nonetheless examine the character of cosmic rays and magnetic fields in interstellar area, however in as little as one 12 months or maybe just a bit longer, even these should be powered off. By 2036, the probe will depart the Deep House Community and be past all communications.
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