2024-03-16 08:45:17
An artist’s illustration of one of the Voyager spacecraft. Credit: Caltech/NASA-JPL
Since November 2023, NASA’s Voyager 1 has been sending unusable data back to Earth. Engineers detected unusual signals in March, revealing a full memory readout of the onboard computer, offering clues to solving the spacecraft’s data transmission problems.
Since November 2023, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending a stable radio signal to Earth, but the signal contains no usable data. The source of the problem appears to be one of three computers on board, the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), which is responsible for packaging scientific and engineering data before Sending them to Earth by the telemetry modulation unit.
New data signal discovery
On March 3, the Voyager mission team saw activity from one part of the FDS that was different from the rest of the computer’s unreadable data stream. The new signal was not yet in the format used by Voyager 1 when the FDS is working properly, so the team was initially unsure what to do with it. But an engineer with the agency’s Deep Space Network, which operates the radio antennas that communicate with both Voyagers and other spacecraft traveling to and from the moon, was able to decode the new signal and found that it contained a readout of the entire FDS memory.
Troubleshooting and analysis
The FDS memory includes its code, or instructions for what to do, as well as variables, or values used in the code that can change based on commands or the state of the spacecraft. It also contains scientific or engineering data for a link below. The team will compare this reading to the one taken before the problem arose and look for code and variable discrepancies to find the source of the ongoing problem.
This new signal resulted from a command sent to Voyager 1 on March 1. Called “plug” by the team, the command is intended to gently guide the FDS to try different sequences in its software package in case the problem can be solved by going around a faulty section.
Since Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, it takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to reach the spacecraft and another 22.5 hours for the probe’s response to reach antennas on the ground. So the team received the command results on March 3rd. On March 7, engineers began work on decoding the data, and on March 10, they determined it contained a memory read.
The team analyzes the reading. Using this information to come up with a potential solution and try to implement it will take time.
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