NASA’s Voyager 1 probe is currently unable to transmit any scientific or systems data to Earth. The 46-year-old spacecraft, launched in 1977, can receive commands, but a problem appears to have arisen in the probe’s computers.Voyager 1’s flight data system (FDS), which collects engineering information and data from the spacecraft’s scientific instruments, is no longer communicating with the probe’s telecommunications unit (TMU) as expected, according to a December 12 blog post from NASA.
Voyager 1 can’t search home
When working properly, the FDS on Voyager 1 compiles the information the spacecraft collects into a data packet that is then transmitted to Earth using the TMU. Recently, this data packet has become “stuck” and is transmitting a repetitive, meaningless pattern of ones and zeros, NASA said in its blog post. Although Voyager’s engineering team was able to trace the problem to the FDS system, it is unclear how long it will take to resolve it.
Voyager 1 and its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, were launched in 1977 and have been in operation longer than any other spacecraft in history. Both continue to rapidly move away from Earth in interstellar space. Voyager 1 is currently 24.3 million kilometers away from Earth. This translates to a distance of 22 hours and 33 minutes on the speed of light scale. Therefore, mutual communication with Voyager takes approximately 45 hours. For this reason, when NASA engineers were able to send a fix for the probe’s FDS, they had to wait until the next day to find out if it worked.And the solution isn’t as simple as turning the system on and off again (they tried that and it didn’t work). The age and hardware of the spacecraft present a unique set of challenges. NASA technicians must work within the same technology and infrastructure that their predecessors had in the 1970s, which sometimes necessitates some creative software solutions.
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