Until a month ago, the 46-year-old space probe was thought to be “lost” due to a memory error. In fact, there was a connection with the device, but it made no sense – its messages consisted of complete “gibberish”.
In early March, the Voyager 1 spacecraft sent a slightly different signal that could potentially help restart the mission. Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are studying differences in the latest and previous messages to find out why the ship has been sending an “unreadable” stream of data in recent months.
According to NASA, Voyager 1 sent the new data in response to a previously sent command that “gently” invited the onboard Flight Data System (FDS) to “try out different sequences in its software package in case the problem could be solved by working around damaged partitions.”
FDS collects data from Voyager's science instruments, as well as engineering data about the spacecraft's health, and combines it into a single package that is transmitted to Earth through one of the probe's subsystems, the Telemetry Modulation Unit (TMU), in binary code. The team suspects that the “gibberish” anomaly may be due to the FDS and TMU having trouble communicating with each other and causing the telemetry modulation unit to send data in a repeating pattern of ones and zeros.
Voyager: completion. Photo chronicle of the half-century odyssey of NASA's famous twin probes
Voyager 1 launched in 1977, less than a month after its sister probe, Voyager 2, began its own journey through space. In August 2012, Voyager 1 launched into interstellar space and became the first spacecraft to leave the heliosphere.
Voyager 1 is now 24.4 billion km from Earth and flying at a speed of 61,155 km/h. Considering the distance, it now takes about 2 days to send or receive a message from the device.
“Using this information to develop a potential solution and attempt to implement it will take time,” the agency says.
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