Since November 2023, the Voyager 1 space probe has been transmitting to Earth a meaningless collection of ones and zeros instead of on-board telemetry and scientific data. NASA announced today that it has identified the possible source of this problem. It is connected to one of the device’s three on-board computers, or rather to its FSD memory, which is responsible for packaging scientific data and telemetry for subsequent sending to Earth.
NASA did not lose contact with Voyager 1, but for several months its systems responsible for transmitting information to Earth did not actually work. Sending commands to the probe is also risky, since it is unknown how its onboard systems will react to this. Everything is complicated by the fact that even sending a command and receiving a response from the device takes almost two days – the probe is very far from Earth. Based on this, if the problem in the communication system of Voyager 1 cannot be solved, then the deep space exploration device launched almost 47 years ago will most likely be irretrievably lost.
NASA believes that the cause of the problem in the operation of Voyager 1 was the primitive equivalent of RAM inside the on-board flight data system (FDS), which over all these years of operation had, unsurprisingly, become significantly worn out or even damaged.
On March 1, the American Aerospace Agency sent a special team to Voyager 1, which was supposed to force the device to carry out various computer sequences in the hope of detecting damaged sectors inside the FDS memory. The response from the probe was received on March 3. The main part of it contained the same illegible stream of data. However, in one section of the FDS, the mission's engineering team detected activity that was different from the rest of the unreadable stream of information.
Decoding of this information began on March 7. Three days later, the NASA team discovered that the new signal actually contained a full FSD memory dump—the very diagnostic data needed to understand the root of the problem and find a potential solution.
The team continues to analyze the data obtained, NASA clarifies. However, using this information to develop a potential solution and attempt to put it into practice will take time.
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