A month ago, it was believed that the 46-year-old space probe «lost» due to a memory error. In fact, there was communication with the device, but it made no sense — its messages consisted of continuous «gibberish».
In early March, the «Voyager 1» spacecraft sent a slightly different signal that could potentially help restore the mission. Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory are studying the differences in the latest and previous messages to find out why the spacecraft has been sending an «unreadable» data stream in recent months.
How reports NASA, «Voyager 1» has sent new data in response to a previously sent command that «gently» suggests that the onboard Flight Data System (FDS) «try different sequences in its software package in case the problem can be solved by bypassing the damaged sections».
The FDS collects data from Voyager’s scientific instruments «as well as engineering data about the spacecraft’s condition and combines them into a single packet 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 anomaly with «gibberish» may be due to the fact that the FDS and TMU have trouble communicating with each other and as a result, the telemetry modulation unit sends data in a repeating pattern of ones and zeros.
«Voyager 1» was launched in 1977, less than a month after its twin 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 kilometers from Earth and is traveling at a speed of 61,155 km/h. Given the distance, it currently takes about 2 days to send or receive a message from the spacecraft.
«Using this information to develop a potential solution and try to implement it will take time», — the agency says.