There’s another problem with Voyager 1: just junk data from interstellar space

There is another technical problem aboard NASA’s Voyager 1 probe, which is why humanity’s furthest device from Earth is currently not transmitting scientific and technical data. The US space agency has now made this known and clarified that rebooting the faulty system last week did not fix the error. It may now take several weeks for the team to develop a new plan. This is also due to the necessity of searching and combing through operating instructions that are decades old so that you can predict the possible consequences of a new order.

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Device is “suspended”

The problem occurred According to the advertisement On one of the three computers on board Voyager 1. The Flight Data System (FDS) is responsible for, among other things, collecting data from scientific instruments and assembling them with technical information into packages that are transmitted to Earth. However, the computer has recently begun sending repeated patterns of zeros and ones, indicating that the device is somehow “stuck.” Even after rebooting, the device was not sending any usable data. This makes problem solving more complex.

Voyager 1 and its sister probe Voyager 2 were launched in 1977 and were able to take advantage of a rare constellation in which the four largest planets in the solar system came particularly close to each other. Both visited Jupiter and gained momentum from it to Saturn, where their paths diverged: Voyager 1 launched from the level of the solar system, and Voyager 2 to Uranus and Neptune. Originally only a four-year mission was planned, but they have now been on the road for 46 years and are still active. The Voyager program has long been one of NASA’s greatest successes. More recently, the Voyager twins reached interstellar space – since there were a lot of failures in space probes at the time, there were two of each that mattered.

The problems have increased recently because the sensors are very old. In addition, at least the NASA employees responsible for development and initial operations are retired. Many simply took their boxes of documents home with them. Some of them are still in the garages there, but they have to be found there first. This was actually necessary last year when Voyager 1 suddenly sent mysterious data from interstellar space. The work isn’t made any easier by the probe’s enormous distance: the signal now takes 22.5 hours to get there, so the answer won’t be available for two days at the earliest.

(meh)