Even 47 years after its launch, Voyager 1 continues to impress humanity with its capabilities. You may think that the spacecraft, which passed into interstellar space with its twin, no longer has any more capabilities to surprise us. However, another glitch in the past few weeks caused communication to be interrupted, and the spacecraft managed to find a surprising solution to this problem by using hardware that has not been used since 1981.
The probe is currently more than 24 billion kilometers away from Earth. It takes more than 22 and a half hours for a signal to reach or arrive from the spacecraft. On October 16, the ground crew asked the spacecraft to turn on one of its heaters. Because Voyager 1 is in an extremely cold environment, its internal systems need to be kept warm to function. The spacecraft runs on radioactivity, and although its energy source is now running out, it still has plenty of energy for heating.
However, something went wrong and on October 18, Voyager 1 did not respond. The probe uses an X-band radio transmitter to communicate with the Deep Space Network. The mission team calculated that the command may have triggered the fail-safe system, resulting in a change in the signal from the X-band transmitter, resulting in a lower data transmission rate.
The team managed to find this signal by searching for it. Although this caused some disruption, it did not cause any alarm, unlike last year when the spacecraft made meaningless noises. The team then began to examine the situation more deeply. However, on October 19, an alarming development occurred and the signal stopped completely. Fortunately, Voyager 1’s onboard computer found an unconventional solution.
“The flight crew suspected that Voyager 1’s fail-safe system had triggered twice more, shutting off the X-band transmitter and switching to a second radio transmitter called S-band,” said NASA’s Tony Greicius in his article on Voyager Blog. “While S-band uses less power, Voyager 1 has not used it to communicate with Earth since 1981. It uses a different frequency than the X-band transmitter signal and the signal is significantly weaker. “The flight crew was unsure if S-band could be detected on Earth due to the distance of the spacecraft, but engineers at the Deep Space Network were able to find it.”
The team confirmed that the S-band transmitter was working well, even after all this time and an incredible distance. They are currently working to return the spacecraft to normal operation.
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