Twelve years ago, the Voyager 1 probe left our solar system. Nevertheless, until recently it regularly sent scientific data to Earth. But these have been unusable since November 2023. Now the American space agency NASA has found the cause.
As NASA recently reported on its website, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena discovered that a small amount of memory in one of the computers aboard Voyager 1 caused the probe to send unreadable data to Earth.
This is done by a computer called the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), which is actually responsible for collecting the scientific and technical data from the probe before the so-called Telemetry Modulation Unit (TMU) and transmitter send the data to Earth.
Three percent of the memory is damaged
In early March, the JPL team issued a so-called POKE command (an instruction in the BASIC programming language, ed.) to ask the probe to return a dump of the FDS memory containing the computer’s software code and variables (used in the code Values that may change depending on the command or status of the probe (Note). As a result, it was determined that approximately three percent of the FDS memory is damaged and the computer can no longer operate normally.
The reason for the damage is unclear
The JPL team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of FDS memory is malfunctioning. NASA reports that it is not possible to determine with certainty what exactly caused the problem. It is possible that the chip was hit by a high-energy particle from space or that it simply failed after 46 years.
Although it could take weeks or months, engineers at JPL, which operates satellites and spacecraft for NASA, are optimistic about finding a way to get the FDS functioning normally without the unusable storage hardware, allowing Voyager 1 to return to science and engineering . facts.
“Voyager 1” is expected to continue transmitting data until 2025
‘Voyager 1’ will probably be able to deliver data until 2025, but by then the probe’s energy source will be exhausted. However, the farthest man-made object from Earth will continue to fly through space and not pass the next star for more than 38,000 years, a faint sun with catalog number AC+79 3888 in the constellation Ursa Minor.
In the extremely unlikely event that an alien civilization would ever encounter the Earth ambassador, the “Voyager” probes each carry a gold-plated copper plaque (pictured above) titled “Lute of the Earth” and a record player with instructions for use.
The probe has been hurtling through space since 1977
‘Voyager 1’ (Traveller) was launched on September 5, 1977, the twin probe ‘Voyager 2’ about two weeks earlier, on August 20. The two probes race through space at more than 60,000 kilometers per hour. With a distance of almost 24.3 billion kilometers (as of the end of March 2024) to our Earth, ‘Voyager 1’ is humanity’s most distant messenger.
Source: Krone
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