On April 20, the NASA spacecraft, which is currently outside the solar system, updated its «health» — data and sent quite analyzable information after broadcasting continuous gibberish for 5 months. This concerns information about the state of the ship’s onboard engineering systems.
«Voyager 1» was launched in 1977 and 35 years later became the first human-made object to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space. 6 years later, in 2018, its space sister, «Voyager 2», also went beyond the solar system.
Fortunately, «Voyager 2» is still working and communicating well with the Earth. However, there was a failure in the exchange of information with «Voyager 1» on November 14, 2023. The spacecraft began transmitting a meaningless stream of binary code. At the beginning of this year was consideredThe company said that due to a memory error in the onboard Flight Data System (FDS), communication with the ship was lost forever.
У March NASA’s «Voyager 1» operations team sent a digital request to the spacecraft, prompting its FDS subsystem to send a full memory read back home. This memory dump showed engineers that the «failure» was the result of corrupted code contained on a single chip, which accounts for about 3% of the FDS’s memory. The loss of this code rendered Voyager 1’s «science and engineering data unusable.
Since it was physically impossible to replace the damaged memory chip on a spacecraft 24 billion kilometers from Earth, other solutions had to be found. The decision was made to remotely relocate the code stored in the damaged chip to other parts of the FDS memory. Since no single memory partition is large enough to fully accommodate this code, the team decided to divide it into sections and store these parts separately. To do so, they also had to tweak the respective storage partitions to make sure that adding this corrupted code would not cause those areas to stop working individually or working together as a whole. In addition to this, NASA staff also had to ensure that any references to the location of the corrupted code were updated.
On April 18, 2024, the team began sending the code to a new location in the FDS memory. This was a painstaking process because it takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to travel the distance between Earth and «Voyager 1», and then another 22.5 hours to receive a signal from the ship.
However, by Saturday, April 20, the team confirmed that their modification worked. For the first time in 5 months, the scientists were able to contact «Voyager 1» and check its health. Over the next few weeks, the team will work to tweak the rest of the FDS software and aim to restore the parts of the system that are responsible for packaging and returning vital scientific data from outside the solar system.
Source: space