(NewsInsights.org) – NASA launched two probes in the fall of 1977, hoping to learn more about our solar system’s largest planets and their moons. In November 2023, scientists lost the ability to receive meaningful data from Voyager 1. On April 20, a team of Caltech Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) scientists celebrated successfully recovering science transmission capability with the 46-plus-year-old probe.
In 1989, the Voyager program completed its primary mission of capturing data about Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Voyager 1 began traveling out of the solar system after its 1980 flyby of Jupiter’s moon Titan. By August 2012, Voyager 1, the fastest of the two probes, reached interstellar space.
Imagine a computer chip fails in your 1977 vehicle. Now imagine it's in interstellar space, 15 billion miles away. @NASA's Voyager probe just got fixed by this team of brilliant software mechanics.
The backstory: https://t.co/Wjo8l8tM7C pic.twitter.com/kR9FeP81cR— Chris Hadfield (@Cmdr_Hadfield) April 23, 2024
Both probes relayed valuable data as they scouted a new frontier for humankind. However, engineers noted a problem with the data Voyager 1 was sending in November. They confirmed that the probe was “receiving and executing commands sent from Earth” but diagnosed a malfunction in the telemetry modulation unit (TMU), preventing Voyager 1 from transmitting science and engineering data to Earth.
In March, Caltech JPL engineers and programmers diagnosed the problem as a malfunctioning chip. They devised a strategy to redistribute the programs typically executed by the malfunctioning chip to several other parts of the three-computer flight data subsystem (FDS). They had to subdivide and coordinate the code because the program took too much space to fit on any existing memory space on a single chip.
The team wrote and tested the memory update before sending it to Voyager 1 on April 18. Caltech JPL reported that radio signal transmissions to Voyager 1 take almost a full day to reach the probe at 22.5 hours. Return transmissions take an equal amount of time. On April 20, scientists discovered their modifications had worked when they received the spacecraft’s first health and data check in five months.
The Voyager probes each use solar panels and three Plutonium-238 radioisotope thermoelectric generators. Since passing into interstellar space so far from the sun, the spacecraft have relied solely on the generators for power. While engineers have continually optimized power usage, the 87.7-year half-life of Plutonium-238 will likely limit communications capability to no more than another 10 years. Still, the spacecraft has already exceeded their designers’ projections and expectations.
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