On December 12, 2023, NASA shared some troubling news about Voyager 1, the first probe to fly away from our planet. Solar SystemThe party of gravity and entering into isolation Interstellar space. Voyager 1 appears to be surrounded by darkness, and is malfunctioning.
It has been around for over 45 years You provided us With an abundance of treasures such as the discovery of two new moons of Jupiter, and another amazing episode of Saturn And the warm feeling that comes from knowing parts of our lives will drift through the universe even after we're gone. (See: Golden Record.) But now, Voyager 1His fate seems uncertain.
As of February 6, NASA He said the team is still working to restore the spacecraft to proper health. “Engineers are still working to resolve the data issue on Voyager 1,” NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said He said in a post on X (formerly Twitter). “We can talk to the spacecraft, and it can hear us, but it's a slow process given the incredible distance the spacecraft is from Earth.”
Related: NASA's Voyager space probes are getting software updates broadcast from 12 billion miles away
So, on the bright side, even though Voyager 1 is located quite far away from us, ground control can actually communicate with it. In fact, last year, scientists Some software updates were broadcast For the spacecraft as well as its counterpart, Voyager 2, from billions of miles away. Although on the faint side, because of that distance, only one back-and-forth communication has been made between Voyager 1 and anyone on the moon's surface. Land It takes a total of 45 hours. If NASA finds a solution, it won't be the case for some time.
Engineers realized the problem was with one of the computers on board Voyager 1 known as the Flight Data System, or FDS. (The FDS standby service ceased operation in 1981.)
“The FDS system is not communicating properly with one of the probe's subsystems, called the Telemetry Modulation Unit (TMU),” NASA said. He said In a blog post. “As a result, no scientific or engineering data is transmitted to Earth.” This is of course even though ground control can already send the information to Voyager 1, which, At the time of writing this articleIt is located about 162 astronomical units from our planet. One AU Equals the distance between the Earth and the sunOr 149,597,870.7 kilometers (92,955,807.3 miles).
From the beginning
The FDS dilemma for Voyager 1 was: I first noticed it last yearafter the probe's TMU stopped sending clear data and started buying up a bunch of garbage.
As NASA explained in the blog post, one of the primary functions of the FDS is to collect information about the spacecraft itself, in terms of its health and general condition. “It then combines that information into a single data packet to be sent back to Earth by the TMU,” the post says. “Data is in the form of ones and zeros, or binary code.”
However, it appears that TMU is modifying A It's not understandable A recent version of the binary code. Or, as the team says, the system appears to be “stuck.” Yes, the engineers tried turning it off and on again.
This didn't work.
Then, in early February, Susan Dodd, Voyager project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, He told Ars Technica That the team may have finally figured out what's going on with FDS. The theory is that the problem lies somewhere in the memory of the Defense and Security Forces. There may be a damaged part of the computer. But unfortunately, because the FDS and TMU work together to relay information about the health of the spacecraft, engineers have difficulty knowing exactly where potential corruption is located. A messenger is one who needs a messenger.
But they know that the spacecraft must be alive because they receive what is known as a “carrier tone.” The wavelengths of carrier tones do not carry information, but they are nonetheless signals similar to a heartbeat. It's also worth noting that Voyager 1 has had problems before, such as in 2022 when the probe's “attitude expression and control system” showed some fluctuations that were eventually corrected. Something similar happened to Voyager 2 during the summer of 2023, when Voyager 1's twin suffered some antenna complications before coming back online.
However, Dodd says this was the most dangerous situation since she began working on the historic Voyager mission.
“Beer aficionado. Gamer. Alcohol fanatic. Evil food trailblazer. Avid bacon maven.”