Contact was reestablished. These were moments of concern, when NASA was not entirely sure if they would be able to recover this valuable tool. And it is no wonder, if we consider that this spaceship that tIt is more than 64 years old and was built for a mission of only 5 years. and that the last engineer of the original team retired almost a decade ago.
The failure that affected Voyager 1 in November 2023 was a problem in the flight data subsystem (FDS), one of the computers on board the probe. This problem caused Voyager 1 to send unreadable data to Earth, causing concern among NASA engineers.as they could not understand the information or control the spacecraft properly.
After an extensive investigation, NASA determined that the failure was due to a small portion of corrupted memory in the FDS that prevented the computer from properly processing and transmitting data.
The Voyager 1 computers have less than 70 kilobytes of memory in total, the equivalent of a low resolution computer image. They use old digital tapes to record data.
The first interstellar astronaut candidate is not human
Despite the distance, the age of the probe, and the difficulties of working with software written half a century ago, NASA found a way for the FDS to work without the chip damaged memory and resend data scientists normally. The good news is that although it was out of service for more than 5 months, its mission data was stored and can be recovered.
The most extraordinary space journey
Voyager 1 is a robotic space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977, as part of the Voyager program to study the outer Solar System and interstellar space. It is the farthest spacecraft from Earth and the first man-made object to enter outer space.
This ship is so far away from us that although its transmissions travel at the speed of light, it takes a day to reach Earth.
She is a tireless traveler. Its original mission was to visit Jupiter and Saturn, but after its success, Voyager 1 was sent to explore interstellar space, studying the region beyond the influence of the Sun. In total, it has traveled more than 24 billion kilometers from Earth and continues to move away at a speed of 61,122 km/h.
It has the milestone of being the first spacecraft in unknown space. On August 25, 2012, it crossed the heliopause, the boundary that marks the limit of the solar wind, becoming the first spacecraft to reach interstellar space. It is located in a place of great interest to scientists because it escapes the influence of the magnetic fields created by the Sun and enters the domains of plasma.
And that’s not all. The ship He carries with him some records that contain sounds and images that portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth. They were designed with the objective of making the existence of life on Earth known to any possible intelligent extraterrestrial life form that would find them. The content of the recording was selected by NASA and a committee chaired by Carl Sagan himself.
