NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, the farthest man-made object in space, has been sending back “incoherent” data back to mission controllers since November 2023. The space agency on Thursday said it identified what issue is causing the pioneering spacecraft to send back “nonsense” to Earth.
According to NASA, the issue seems to be with the flight data subsystem, (FDS) one of the three onboard computers, which packages science and engineering data before it is sent back to our planet by the telemetry modulation unit.
The Voyager mission team on March 3 saw activity from one section of the FDS that was different from the rest of the unreadable data stream coming from the company. The signal they found was still not in the format used by Voyager 1 when the FDS 1 was working properly and the team was not sure what to make of it initially.
But then, an engineer with NASA’s Deep Space Network was able to decode the signal and found that it contains a readout of the entire FDS memory. This memory includes the instructions that FD has for what to do and also the values in the code that can change based on commands or the spacecraft’s status. Also, it contained science and engineering data meant for downlink.
The Voyager team then looked at this readout and compared it tot he one that came before the issue and looked for any discrepancies. After this, they sent a command to Voyager 1 on March 1, called a “poke” by the team. This command prompts the FDS to try different sequences in its software package in case the issue could be resolved by circumventing the malfunctioning section.
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First uploaded on: 15-03-2024 at 14:40 IST
Shambhu Kumar is a science communicator, making complex scientific topics accessible to all. His articles explore breakthroughs in various scientific disciplines, from space exploration to cutting-edge research.
