In a triumphant milestone, NASA engineers have partially restored a 1970s-era computer on the Voyager 1 spacecraft, providing engineers with a comprehensive status update after five months of unreadable data transmission. A team of experts gathered at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) to witness the spacecraft’s response to a critical command sent on Thursday, designed to recode a portion of the Flight Data Subsystem’s (FDS) memory. The FDS is responsible for packaging engineering and scientific data for transmission to Earth. The successful execution of this command enabled engineers to pinpoint the location of the problem within the FDS memory, which they subsequently addressed by relocating the affected code to a different portion of the memory bank. The team also discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory had failed, likely due to cosmic ray radiation or aging hardware. This resulted in the corruption of approximately 3% of the FDS memory, necessitating the transplantation of the affected code into another part of the memory bank. However, no single location within the memory bank was large enough to accommodate the entire section of code, prompting the Voyager team to divide the code into sections for storage in different locations within the FDS. This required meticulous modification of the code to ensure compatibility with its new locations. The restoration of the engineering data stream provides the Voyager team with crucial insights into the spacecraft’s health, including power levels and temperature measurements. While the spacecraft’s scientific instruments remain offline, engineers remain optimistic. They anticipate that the restoration of the engineering data stream will pave the way for the recovery of lost science data, including observations of a unique plasma density and magnetic field jump, known as Pressure Front 2. This phenomenon has been observed in Voyager 1’s data for three and a half years, and scientists are eager to study it further to determine whether it originates from the Sun or interstellar space. The successful restoration of Voyager 1’s engineering data stream is a testament to the dedication and ingenuity of the NASA team. It underscores the resilience of the Voyager spacecraft, which continue to explore the outer reaches of our solar system and provide valuable insights into the nature of interstellar space.
NASA Recovers Voyager 1’s Engineering Data After Five Months
