After ceasing to communicate coherently with mission control in November 2023 due to a computer failure, a creative solution by the mission team reestablished interaction with the spacecraft that studies plasma waves, magnetic fields and particles.
This information is important for showing scientists how particles and magnetic fields change as the probe moves away.
Mission control on Earth, located at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Pasadena, California, receives that data in binary code, or a series of ones and zeros; However, the single chip responsible for storing some of the system’s memory, including some of the computer’s software code, stopped working properly, and the loss of code on the chip caused scientific and engineering data to become unusable.
According to NASA, to solve this problem, the team stored the affected code of the chip in another place in the system memory and, when they did not find a large enough space, they divided it into sections and stored them in different places within the system. flight data.
After finding and repairing those faults, engineers will synchronize the timing software on the three computers aboard the spacecraft so they can execute commands at the right time.
“The team will also perform maintenance on the digital recorder, which records some data for the plasma wave instrument that is sent to Earth twice a year,” said the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). ).
Currently, the ship is about 24 billion kilometers from Earth, Voyager 2, 20 billion.
Both twin probes took off within weeks of each other in 1977 and remain active four decades later, after initially flying by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.
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