NASA Engineers Receive a New Message from Voyager 1 after 5 Months. But how did the NASA team manage to fix the probe 15 billion miles away?
The engineering team had already traced the problem to a part of the spacecraft's flight data subsystem. But recently, they identified the specific chip that has failed within that system. But there’s no way we could physically repair the chip, so scientists broke the code held on the failed chip into pieces, and assigned them into the spare corners of the FDS’s memory.
The first such fix was transmitted to Voyager 1 on April 18. With a total distance of 30 billion miles to cross from Earth to the spacecraft and back, the team had to wait nearly two full days for a response from the probe.
Then, on April 20, NASA got confirmation that the initial fix was successful, as the team received a message from the spacecraft.
The space agency plans to send additional commands in the coming weeks to rewrite the rest of the lost code in the FDS system, including commands to restore the spacecraft's ability to transmit science data back to Earth.
While Voyager 1 currently seems to be recovering, NASA scientists acknowledge that its operational life is limited. Eventually, an unfixable glitch may occur, or the spacecraft's diminishing fuel supply will be depleted.
Until then, NASA is committed to extracting as much data as possible from the enduring spacecraft.
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23 апр 2024
