For the first time since November NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, the furthest from Earth and the longest in space, has once again provided readable data Its status and that of its onboard engineering systems were reported by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California and managed by the Technological Institute of the same state. Now, as explained in the same statement, the next step is to get the probe to send scientific data again.
Voyager 1 stopped sending readable data on November 14, 2023, although mission managers checked that the ship was receiving orders and functioning normally. In March, the engineering team at the California lab confirmed that the problem was related to one of the three computers the spacecraft carries on board. Specifically, it was the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), which was responsible for packaging information before sending it to Earth.
This is how it was discovered The chip that stores part of this computer’s memory was not working which in turn contained part of the code of its software. This loss was the cause of this data becoming unusable. Since the chip could not be repaired, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory.
However, no one had the capacity to fully host this part of the code, so that was it He decided to share it and distribute it that way. Of course, some adjustments were necessary, for example to ensure that everything worked as a whole. Additionally, any references to the location of this code elsewhere in the FDS storage needed to be updated.
On April 18th the team sent these updates but did not receive the signal until two days later. This is because it takes 22.5 hours for the information to reach the probe and the same number of hours for it to “respond” to Earth. The modification worked and for the first time in five months the health and condition of the spacecraft could be checked. However, adjustment work will be carried out in the next few weeks so that scientific data can be sent again.
Unique interstellar ships
Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2, They are the only spaceships that have flown among the starsIn fact, these are the probes that are and have been the furthest away from Earth. But also longer, because they were brought onto the market more than 46 years ago.
Before interstellar exploration is carried out, Both probes flew over Saturn and Jupiter, while Voyager 2 also did this over Uranus and Neptune.