An artist’s idea exhibits the Voyager spacecraft touring by way of house towards a discipline of stars. Credit score: NASA/JPL-Caltech
A difficulty affecting knowledge from NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has been repaired by engineers. Earlier this 12 months, the probe’s angle articulation and management system (AACS), which retains Voyager 1’s antenna pointed at Earth, began sending jumbled details about its well being and actions to mission controllers, despite the fact that it was in any other case working usually. It additionally appeared that the remainder of the probe was wholesome because it continued to assemble and return science knowledge.
Since then, the workforce has positioned the supply of the garbled info: The AACS had began sending the telemetry knowledge by way of an onboard pc recognized to have malfunctioned years in the past, and the pc corrupted the information.
Suzanne Dodd, Voyager’s challenge supervisor, mentioned that after they suspected this was the difficulty, they determined to attempt a easy, low-risk answer: commanding the AACS to renew sending the information to the appropriate pc.
Voyager’s high-gain antenna, seen on the heart of this illustration of the NASA spacecraft, is one part managed by the angle articulation and management system (AACS). Credit score: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Engineers don’t but know why the AACS began routing telemetry knowledge to the inaccurate pc. They suppose it doubtless obtained a defective command generated by one other onboard pc. If that’s certainly the case, it might point out there's nonetheless a difficulty some other place on the spacecraft. The workforce will proceed looking for that underlying challenge, however they don’t suppose it's a menace to the long-term well being of Voyager 1.
“We’re glad to have the telemetry again,” mentioned Dodd. “We’ll do a full reminiscence readout of the AACS and take a look at all the things it’s been doing. That may assist us attempt to diagnose the issue that prompted the telemetry challenge within the first place. So we’re cautiously optimistic, however we nonetheless have extra investigating to do.”
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have been exploring our photo voltaic system for 45 years. Each spacecraft are now in interstellar house, the area exterior the heliopause, or the bubble of energetic particles and magnetic fields from the Solar.
Extra In regards to the Mission
A division of Caltech in Pasadena, Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) constructed and operates the Voyager spacecraft. The Voyager missions are part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
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