NASA’s iconic area probe is having bother speaking with its residence planet because of a pc glitch, forcing engineers to resort to decades-old manuals to provide you with a technique to repair the 46-year-old mission.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 is now greater than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away from Earth. The spacecraft has been exploring the outer areas of the photo voltaic system, however it’s not too long ago unable to ship again any science or engineering knowledge because of a difficulty with one in all its three onboard computer systems, NASA said on Tuesday.
The spacecraft’s flight knowledge system (FDS) collects knowledge from Voyager’s science devices, in addition to engineering knowledge concerning the well being of the spacecraft. That knowledge is mixed right into a single bundle so it may be transmitted to Earth by one of many probe’s subsystems, the telemetry modulation unit (TMU), in binary code.
FDS and TMU, nonetheless, have been having bother speaking with one another. Because of this, TMU started sending knowledge to mission management in a repeating sample of ones and zeroes, as if it had been caught. The crew behind the mission believes a difficulty with FDS is the supply of the communication breakdown.
“This previous weekend the crew tried to restart the FDS and return it to the state it was in earlier than the problem started, however the spacecraft nonetheless isn’t returning useable knowledge,” NASA wrote in a press release.
Voyager 1 and its sister ship Voyager 2 have been energetic longer than every other spacecraft in historical past. A formidable feat, however one which comes with distinctive challenges. As a way to provide you with an answer for the area probe, NASA engineers are wanting by authentic paperwork that had been written a long time in the past. “Because of this, it takes time for the crew to know how a brand new command will have an effect on the spacecraft’s operations with a view to keep away from unintended penalties,” the area company wrote.
The spacecraft is so far-off that it takes 22.5 hours for instructions from Earth to achieve Voyager 1 and vice versa. Which means the mission crew has to attend 45 hours to seek out out whether or not the command they despatched out was efficient.
This isn’t the primary time Voyager 1 stopped making sense. Final 12 months, the area probe started transmitting garbled telemetry data that didn’t match up with its precise location and orientation. On the time, NASA engineers discovered that the problem was a results of a defective laptop that was corrupting the info.
Regardless of some minor hiccups, Voyager 1 continues to be doing fairly nicely for an growing old spacecraft and NASA’s longest-operating mission. Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar area in August 2012 to check the outer photo voltaic system and discover past the Solar’s heliosphere, and has traveled farther from Earth than every other spacecraft.
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