Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft on Earth, has begun communicating normally with NASA again after engineers spent months remotely repairing the 46-year-old probe.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which builds and operates the agency’s robotic spacecraft, said in December that probes more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away were sending gibberish to Earth.
In an update released Monday, Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced that the mission team has successfully received usable data on the health and status of Voyager 1’s engineering systems after some creative investigation. JPL said the next step is to get the spacecraft back to work returning science data. It added that despite the malfunction, Voyager 1 operated normally throughout.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was designed with the primary goal of conducting close studies of Jupiter and Saturn during its five-year mission. However, its journey continues, and the spacecraft’s operations are now approaching half a century.
Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in August 2012, becoming the first man-made object to venture out of the solar system. It currently travels at 37,800 mph (60,821 km/h).
The latest issue involves one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, which are responsible for packaging scientific and engineering data before sending it to Earth. Unable to repair the damaged chip, the JPL team decided to move the damaged code elsewhere, a tricky undertaking given the old technology.
The computers on Voyager 1 and its sister probe Voyager 2 have a combined memory of less than 70 kilobytes, equivalent to low-resolution computer graphics. They use old-fashioned digital tapes to record data.
The fix was sent from Earth on April 18, but it took two days to evaluate its success because the radio signal took about 22 and a half hours to reach Voyager 1 and another 22 and a half hours to return to Earth in response. JPL said that when the mission team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they found that the modifications were effective.
In addition to the announcement, JPL released a photo of Voyager flight team members cheering and clapping in a conference room after receiving available data again, with laptops and sweets on the table in front of them. lock up.
Chris Hadfield, a retired Canadian astronaut who flew two space shuttle missions and served as commander of the International Space Station, compared the JPL mission to long-distance maintenance on an old car.
Imagine that a computer chip in your 1977 car fails.Now imagine it 15 billion miles away in interstellar space, Hadfield write on X. The Nasas Voyager detector has just been restored by this amazing team of software technicians.
Voyager 1 and 2 made many scientific discoveries, including detailed documentation of Saturn and revealing that Jupiter also has rings and active volcanism on its moon Io. The probe later discovered 23 new moons around the exoplanets.
Because the Voyager probe’s orbit is too far from the sun to use solar panels, heat from the natural radioactive decay of plutonium is converted into electricity to power the spacecraft systems.
NASA hopes to continue collecting data from the two Voyager spacecraft in the coming years, but engineers expect the probes will be too far out of range to communicate in about a decade, depending on how much power they can generate . Voyager 2 lags slightly behind its twin and moves slightly slower.
In about 40,000 years, the probe will be relatively close from an astronomical perspective to the two stars. Voyager 1 will come within 1.7 light-years of a star in the constellation Ursa Minor, while Voyager 2 will come within a similar distance of a star called Ross 248 in the constellation Andromeda.
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Image Source : www.theguardian.com