Voyager 1 Resumes Communication with Earth After 5-Month Interruption
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, which has been exploring interstellar space since 2012, has resumed communicating with ground control. The spacecraft experienced a glitch in November 2023 that corrupted a code on its flight data subsystem, rendering its science and engineering data unusable.
NASA engineers have been working on a fix and have successfully moved the corrupted code to a new location in the FDS memory. Voyager 1 is now sending back usable information about its health and operating status, and the team is working on recovering the spacecraft’s science data capabilities.
Thirty-five years after its launch in 1977, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space. It was followed out of our cosmic quarters by its space-faring sibling, Voyager 2, six years later in 2018. Voyager 2, thankfully, is still operational and communicating well with Earth.
The two spacecraft remain the only human-made objects exploring space beyond the influence of the sun.
NASA’s Voyager 1 operating team sent a digital “poke” to the spacecraft in March, prompting its flight data subsystem (FDS) to send a full memory readout back home. This memory dump revealed to scientists and engineers that the “glitch” is the result of a corrupted code contained on a single chip representing around 3% of the FDS memory.
The loss of this code rendered Voyager 1’s science and engineering data unusable. The NASA team can’t physically repair or replace this chip, of course, but what they can do is remotely place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory.
Though no single section of the memory is large enough to hold this code entirely, the team can slice it into sections and store these chunks separately. To do this, they will also have to adjust the relevant storage sections to ensure the addition of this corrupted code won’t cause those areas to stop operating individually, or working together as a whole.
In addition to this, NASA staff will also have to ensure any references to the corrupted code’s location are updated.
On April 18, 2024, the team began sending the code to its new location in the FDS memory. This was a painstaking process, as a radio signal takes 22.5 hours to traverse the distance between Earth and Voyager 1, and it then takes another 22.5 hours to get a signal back from the craft.
By Saturday (April 20), however, the team confirmed their modification had worked. For the first time in five months, the scientists were able to communicate with Voyager 1 and check its health.
Over the next few weeks, the team will work on adjusting the rest of the FDS software and aim to recover the regions of the system that are responsible for packaging and returning vital science data from beyond the limits of the solar system.
