NASA Engineers Are Racing To Fix Voyager 1
Voyager 1 is still alive out there, drifting through space, more than 15 billion miles away. But a computer glitch prevented the dedicated mission support team in Southern California from learning much more about the condition of NASA's longest spacecraft.
The computer problem occurred on November 14 and affected Voyager 1's ability to send telemetry data, such as measurements from the spacecraft's science instruments or basic technical information about the probe's performance. Therefore, the team has no information on key parameters related to the aircraft's propulsion, power or control systems.
Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said in an interview with Arce: "If we can recover it, that would be the ultimate miracle. We certainly haven't given up." "There are other things we can try. But this is the worst thing since I became a project manager."
Dodd became project manager of NASA's Voyager mission in 2010, leading a small group of engineers responsible for humanity's exploration of interstellar space. Voyager 1 is the most distant spacecraft ever seen, traveling away from the sun at 38,000 miles per hour (17 kilometers per second).
Voyager 2, launched 16 days before Voyager 1 in 1977, isn't far behind. It took a smooth path through the solar system, passing Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune, while Voyager 1 sped up as it rendezvoused with Saturn to pass its sister spacecraft.
For the past two decades, NASA has used Voyager instruments to study cosmic rays, magnetic fields, and the plasma environment of interstellar space. They don't take pictures anymore. Both probes crossed the heliopause, where the stream of particles emitted by the Sun flows into the interstellar medium.
There are currently no other operational spacecraft to explore interstellar space. NASA's New Horizons probe, which flew past Pluto in 2015, is on track to reach interstellar space in the 2040s.
State of the art 50 years ago
Voyager 1's final problem lies with the probe data subsystem (FDS), one of three computers on the spacecraft that work in conjunction with a central command and control computer and another device that oversees attitude control and targeting.
The FDS is responsible for gathering scientific and technical information from the spacecraft's sensor network and then combining it into a single binary-coded data packet: a series of 1s and 0s. A separate component called telemetry of the Pulse Modulation Unit actually sends packets of data back to Earth via Voyager's 12-foot (3.7-meter) satellite dish.
According to NASA, data packets transmitted by Voyager 1 in November showed a repeating pattern of ones and zeros, as if they were stuck. JPL engineers spent about three months trying to determine the cause of the problem, Dodd said. He said the engineering team was "99.9% sure" the problem was coming from FDS, which appeared to have problems with "frame synchronization" of the data.
So far, the ground team believes the most likely explanation for the problem is a distorted memory of the FDS. However, due to computer crashes, engineers lack detailed information from Voyager 1 that could lead them to the cause of the problem. "It's probably in FDS storage somewhere," Dodd said. "A part has fallen or is damaged. But without telemetry we cannot see where the FDS memory corruption is.”
