Achi news desk-
Earth’s most distant spacecraft, Voyager 1, has begun communicating properly with NASA again after engineers worked for months to repair the 46-year-old remote probe.
Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which makes and operates the agency’s robotic spacecraft, said in December that the probe – more than 15bn miles (24bn kilometers) away – was sending gibberish code back to the Earth.
In an update released on Monday, JPL announced that the mission team had succeeded “after some ingenious sleuthing” in receiving usable data about the health and status of Voyager 1’s engineering systems. “The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning data science again,” said JPL. Despite the fault, Voyager 1 had operated normally throughout, he added.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was designed with the primary goal of conducting close-up studies of Jupiter and Saturn in a five-year mission. However, her journey continued and the spacecraft is now approaching half a century in operation.
Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in August 2012, making it the first human object to venture out of the solar system. It is currently traveling at 37,800mph (60,821km/h).
The recent problem involved one of the three computers on board the spacecraft, which is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it is sent to Earth. Unable to repair a broken chip, the JPL team decided to move the corrupted code elsewhere, a difficult job given the old technology.
The computers on Voyager 1 and its sister probe, Voyager 2, have a total of less than 70 kilobytes of memory – the equivalent of a low-resolution computer image. They use old fashioned digital tape to record data.
The fix was transmitted from Earth on 18 April but it took two days to assess whether it had been successful as a radio signal took about 22 and a half hours to reach Voyager 1 and another 22 and a half hours for a response to get back to it. Earth. “When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they found that the modification was working,” JPL said.
Alongside its announcement, JPL posted a photo of Voyager flight team members cheering and clapping in a conference room after receiving usable data again, with laptops, notebooks and donuts on the table in front of them.
Retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who flew two space shuttle missions and served as commander of the International Space Station, compared the JPL mission to long-distance maintenance on a vintage car.
“Imagine a computer chip failed in your vehicle in 1977. Now imagine it’s in interstellar space, 15bn miles away,” Hadfield wrote on X. “The NASA Voyager probe has just been fixed by this team of brilliant software mechanics.
Voyager 1 and 2 have made a number of scientific discoveries, including taking detailed recordings of Saturn and revealing that Jupiter also has rings, as well as active volcanism on one of its moons, Io. The searchers later discovered 23 new moons around the outer planets.
As their trajectory takes them so far from the sun, the Voyager probes are unable to use solar panels, instead converting the heat produced from the natural radioactive decay of plutonium into electricity to power the spacecraft’s systems .
Nasa hopes to continue collecting data from the two Voyager spacecraft for several more years, but engineers expect the probes will be too far out of range to communicate in about a decade, depending on how much power the they can produce it. Voyager 2 is slightly behind its twin and is moving slightly more slowly.
In about 40,000 years, the probes will get relatively close, in astronomical terms, to two stars. Voyager 1 will come within 1.7 light years of a star in the Ursa Minor constellation, while Voyager 2 will come within a similar distance of a star called Ross 248 in the Andromeda constellation.
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