NASA's Voyager 1 probe is finally making sense again in interstellar space.
After months of sending junk data about its health to flight controllers on
Earth, the 45-year-old Voyager 1 is once again beaming back clear telemetry
data on its status beyond our solar system. NASA knew the problem was
somewhere in the spacecraft's attitude articulation and control system, or
AACS, which keeps Voyager 1's antenna pointed at Earth. But the solution was
surprising.
"The AACS had started sending the telemetry data through an onboard computer
known to have stopped working years ago, and the computer corrupted the
information," NASA officials wrote in an update Tuesday (Aug. 30). The rest
of the spacecraft was apparently fine, collecting data as it normal.
Once engineers began to suspect Voyager 1 was using a dead computer, they
simply sent a command to the probe so its AACS system would use the right
computer to phone home. It was a low-risk fix, but time consuming. It takes
a radio signal nearly 22 hours to reach Voyager 1, which was 14.6 billion
miles (23.5 billion kilometers) from Earth and growing farther by the second
as of Aug. 30.
With the Voyager 1 data glitch solved, NASA is now pondering a new mystery:
what caused it in the first place.
“We're happy to have the telemetry back," Voyager project manager Suzanne
Dodd said in a statement. "We'll do a full memory readout of the AACS and
look at everything it's been doing. That will help us try to diagnose the
problem that caused the telemetry issue in the first place."
Engineers suspect Voyager 1 began routing its health and status telemetry
through the dead computer after receiving a bad command from yet another
onboard computer. That would suggest some other problem lurking inside
Voyager 1's computer brains, but mission managers don't think it's a threat
to the iconic spacecraft's long-term health.
Still, they'd like to know exactly what's going inside Voyager 1.
"So we're cautiously optimistic, but we still have more investigating to
do," Dodd said in the statement.
NASA launched the Voyager 1 spacecraft, and its twin Voyager 2, in 1977 on a
mission to explore the outer planets of the solar system. Voyager 1 flew by
Jupiter and Saturn during its primary mission and kept going, ultimately
entering interstellar space in 2012, with Voyager 2 reaching that milestone
in 2018.
You can track the status of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 on this NASA website
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Space & Astrophysics