After five months without concrete communication, the man-made object that is furthest from Earth communicated again with the scientists who operate it.
In the immensity of space, in what is unknown to human beings, there is an object created by his own hands that It became the furthest that has traveled from Earth.
This is the probe Voyager 1located exactly at 24,000 million kilometers and it continues to move away every second, now traveling outside our Solar System, at about 61,500 kilometers per hour.
Thirty-five years after its launch in 1977, Voyager 1 had made its operators at NASA very nervous, since towards the end of last year it lost communication with our planet. Or rather, he was still in communication, but with messages that were indecipherable and meaningless, as a result of a breakdown or failure in their computers.
It was exactly on November 14, 2023, after 11 years of exploration of interstellar space and while at an astonishing distance of 24 billion kilometers from Earth, when spaceship binary code, a computer language composed of zeros and ones that you use to communicate, it stopped making sense for the mission specialists who control it and send it different commands.
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NASA worked 5 months to solve a problem with one of the three computers aboard the aging Voyager 1 interstellar spacecraft, called the flight data system (FDS), that was not communicating properly with one of the probe’s subsystems, called the telecommunications unit (TMU).
The thing 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 that information into a single “packet” of data that the TMU sends back to Earth. The data is in the form of ones and zeros, or binary code. Variable combinations of two numbers are the basis of all computer language.
And in November, the TMU began transmitting a repeating pattern of ones and zeros as if it were “stuck.” After ruling out other possibilitiesthe Voyager team determined that the source of the problem was the FDS. Engineers tried to restart the FDS several times and return it to the state it was in before the problem began, but the spacecraft returned no usable data.
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It took the engineers several weeks to develop a new plan to solve the problem. It’s just that finding solutions to the challenges facing probes often involves consulting original documents decades old written by engineers who did not anticipate the problems that arise today.
Additionally, orders from mission controllers on Earth take 22.5 hours to reach Voyager 1, which is exploring the outer regions of our Solar System. That means the engineering team has to wait 45 hours to get a response from Voyager 1 to determine if a command had the desired result.
But on April 20, the spacecraft and its twin, Voyager 2, which are the two spacecraft that have been operating the longest in history, began sending meaningful messages that could be deciphered. “Voyager 1 is providing usable data on the health and status of its onboard engineering systems,” NASA said in a statement.
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In March, NASA’s Voyager 1 operating team sent a digital “nudge” to the spacecraft space, causing its flight data subsystem (FDS) to send a full memory read to Earth.
This memory dump revealed to scientists and engineers that the “glitch” is the result of altered code contained in a single chip that represents about 3% of the FDS’s memory. The loss of this code left Voyager 1’s scientific and engineering data unusable for 5 months.
Yes ok The NASA team cannot physically repair or replace this chip, what they did was remotely place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. Although no section of memory is large enough to contain this code in its entirety, the team was able to divide it into sections and store these fragments separately.
To do this, you also had to adjust the relevant storage sections to ensure that the addition of this corrupt code does not cause those areas to stop working individually or working together as a whole. In addition to this, NASA staff also had to ensure that any references to the location of the altered code were updated.
On April 18, 2024, the team began sending the code to its new location in FDS memory. This was a painstaking process, as it takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to travel the distance between Earth and Voyager 1, and then it takes another 22.5 hours to receive a signal from the spacecraft.
However, On Saturday, April 20, the team confirmed that their modification had worked. For the first time in five months, scientists were able to communicate with Voyager 1 and check its status. Over the next few weeks, the team will work on fine-tuning the rest of the FDS software and will aim to recover the regions of the system that are responsible for packaging and returning vital scientific data from beyond the boundaries of the solar system.
Apparently, Corrosion on a chip prevented data system computers from accessing a vital segment of software code used for packaging information, for subsequent transmission to Earth. Thus, the problem was resolved by changing the affected code to different locations in the memory of the probe’s computers, NASA said.
Fortunately, too, Voyager 2 is still operational and communicating well with Earth. The two spacecraft remain the only man-made objects that explore space beyond the influence of the Sun.
The space probe has advanced beyond the bubble of gas emitted by the Sun, a domain known as the heliosphere. That happened in 2012, and now they are traveling in interstellar space, which contains gas, dust, and the magnetic fields of other stars.
Voyager 1 It departed Earth on September 5, 1977, a few days after its sister spacecraft, Voyager-2.
The main objective of the twin spacecraft was to study the planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, a task they completed in 1989, and then they were taken into deep space, towards the center of our galaxy.
Voyager 2, which flew over Uranus and Neptune, continues to operate normally after having already traveled more than 20.3 billion kilometers from our planet.
