NASA's Voyager 1 deep space probe may get a new lease on life thanks to an unexpected download from one of its onboard computers. After months of sending back gibberish instead of collected data, the craft may have provided a clue to its salvation.
Launched in 1977 from the Kennedy Space Cater in Florida, Voyager 1, along with its sister craft Voyager 2, are the longest-lived. active, nonpassive spacecraft in existence. They are also part of an elite fleet of five probes that are on trajectories that will take them out of the solar system, never to return.
What is also impressive about Voyager 1 is that, after its flybys of Jupiter and Saturn ending in 1980, it wasn't designed to survive much longer. However, thanks to a lot of overengineering and its nuclear power source, the probe continues to function after 47 years in the harsh conditions of deep space as it plunges into interstellar regions.
It's a remarkable achievement, but Voyager 1 is showing its age and isn't anticipated to last more than a few more years as its radio-thermal generators run down. That is, if NASA engineers manage to overcome a computer glitch that cropped up in November 2023.
The problem wasn't that Voyager 1 wasn't communicating with Earth. It was sending back gibberish. Not only was Mission Control at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California not getting any useful data, it also wasn't getting any systems telemetry or confirmation that the craft was responding to commands.
The trouble was eventually tracked down to one of Voyager 1's three onboard computers. Specifically, the flight data subsystem (FDS), which packages the science and engineering data for transmission to Earth by the telemetry modulation unit.
Isolating this was a first step, but the software for the Voyager probes was written in the mid-1970s and the people responsible have long retired. Even the documentation is literally turning yellow with age. This meant a lot of relearning for the Voyager team and a lot of patience. Suspecting that the problem might be a set of corrupted code, Mission Control started sending a series of commands to Voyager 1 in hopes of bypassing the corruption.
According to NASA, on March 1, 2024, a command was sent. Because Voyager 1 is over 15 billion miles (24 billion km) from Earth, it took almost two days for a reply to return from the probe. On March 3, the team received more gibberish from a section of the FDS that wasn't like the previous gibberish.
In fact, it wasn't gibberish at all. An engineer at NASA's Deep Space Network recognised it for what it was and decoded it. By March 10, the "gibberish" turned out to be the entire FDS memory.
What this means is that NASA now has a list of the science and telemetry data that Voyager 1 was supposed to send, the FDS operating instructions, and the values of the variables in the memory that are changed due to commands or Voyager 1's status. With the cosmic Rosetta Stone, the space agency hopes that it will be able to compare the readout to previous ones before the breakdown. In this way the source of the problem can be identified and repaired.
They hope.
Source: NASA
