News On April 6, NASA released a press statement announcing that Voyager 1 had finally identified the cause of the gibberish data it had been transmitting for nearly five months, offering hope for restoring communication.
Voyager 1 is currently about 24 billion kilometers (15 billion miles) away from Earth and has been sending unreadable data to ground control since November 14, 2023.
Despite this, Voyager 1 remained active over the past few months, continuously sending stable signals without any decipherable content.
Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California worked tirelessly to eliminate various obstacles and determined that the issue was caused by partial memory damage. The malfunctioning memory module was located in Voyager 1’s Flight Data System (FDS).
Note: One of the responsibilities of the FDS is to package Voyager 1’s scientific and engineering data and relay it to Earth through the spacecraft’s Telemetry Modulation Unit and radio transmitter.
NASA stated that about 3% of the FDS memory was damaged, preventing the computer from functioning normally.
After weeks of meticulous new code inspection, engineers pinpointed the location of the faulty memory. NASA’s latest announcement on Thursday mentioned:
The research team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing the affected FDS memory section is problematic. Engineers are unable to determine the exact cause of this issue. There are two possibilities: the chip might have been struck by high-energy particles from space, or it could have worn out after 46 years of use.
The distance of Voyager 1 from Earth adds complexity to the troubleshooting process. Radio signals take about 22.5 hours to travel one way from Earth to Voyager 1, meaning it takes engineers approximately 45 hours to understand how the spacecraft responds to their commands.
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