Voyager continues on its interplanetary journey. NASA’s spacecraft, which is in interstellar space, stopped sending readable science and engineering data to Earth in November 2023. Since then, NASA engineers got to work finding the fault and solution.
What happened to Voyager 1?
Voyager’s engineering team at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) indicated that the spacecraft’s problem was related to one of the three computers. This is the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS is important as it is responsible for packaging Voyager’s scientific and engineering data before sending it to Earth.
The solution was not easy at all. The team showed all their creativity to repair the ship that is outside our Solar System. The engineers decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. Then a new problem arose. Where could you move? No location was large enough to contain the entire code section. They then decided to divide it, which involved a series of adjustments, before making the move. April 18 was D-Day of the Voyager 1 rescue mission.
On April 20 of this year, relief was felt at NASA headquarters. The repair had apparently worked. For the first time in five months they were able to check the status of Voyager 1, but the work was not yet finished. The space agency reported that the next step was to relocate and adjust the other software-affected parts of the spacecraft’s FDS memory. This phase was expected to last a couple of weeks, considering that any transmission to Voyager takes almost a day.
“Still here”
This Wednesday, May 8, the official Voyager account on X (formerly Twitter) has shown signs of life. “Still here. And still more than 24 billion kilometers from Earth. It takes my team approximately 22.5 hours to send me a command and another 22.5 hours for my response to reach them. That will continue to increase the further you travel into interstellar space.”was the message in X.
