After several months full of anguish and mystery, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has finally returned to send us messages that we can understand. This has been reported by the United States space agency itself.
According to the information, for the first time since last November the mission team has been able to communicate correctly with the probe and was thus able to check the status of the ship from the last century that, together with its twin sister, the Voyager 2 are the only objects made by humanity that have reached interstellar space. The next step now will be to allow Voyager 1 to send us again the scientific data it collects from the remote area.
Two sisters in interstellar space
Launched into space more than 46 years ago, in 1977, the twin Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are the longest-lived and most distant spacecraft in the history of space travel. Before beginning their interstellar exploration, both flew near Saturn and Jupiter (that was the original mission), Uranus and Neptune, before embarking on their long journey to the outer Solar System. But both probes continued working after completing their missions.
In recent years there have already been several communications anomalies and some periods of silence, such as last year, when Voyager 2 had a problem with its main antenna.
The enigmatic signal from Voyager 1
The last time something went wrong was, as we have already told you, when Voyager 1 stopped communicating correctly with scientists on Earth since November 14 of last year. Then he sent in a mysterious signal an incomprehensible series of zeros and ones. Temporarily incomprehensible, because last March, the team of engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory managed to decipher it and confirm that the problem was related to a breakdown in one of the three onboard computers, called the Flight Data (FDS), which is responsible for packaging scientific and engineering data before it is sent to Earth.
What were the problems with the on-board computer?
The team of scientists later discovered that the failure affected a single chip, precisely the one responsible for the FDS memory. It is for this reason that the equipment rendered useless and incomprehensible the scientific and technical data sent by the probe. Faced with the obvious impossibility of repairing the chip, the scientists opted to try to modify, update and reinsert the code responsible for packaging the engineering data, sending it to a new location in FDS memory on April 18.
Communication was restored
We must remember that we are talking about a very considerable distance. A radio signal takes about 22 and a half hours to reach Voyager 1, since it is more than 24 billion kilometers from Earth, and then you have to wait another 22 and a half hours for the response to return. Earth, which means a total of 45 hours, almost two whole days, for a single communication. Thus, when the NASA team received a response from the ship on April 20, they were able to verify that their modification was working: for the first time in five months they were able to check the status of the ship. The next step will now be to try to transfer and modify the other affected parts of the Fds software, including some that will start returning scientific data again. Source: Wired
