Alexander Lewis
Apr 06, 2024
Voyager 1, a spacecraft launched by NASA in 1977, has been sending back a confusing stream of data since November 2023. Recently, NASA engineers have uncovered the source of the problem and are working on a solution to restore its communication.
For the past five months, Voyager 1 has been transmitting incomprehensible signals back to Earth. This has puzzled scientists, as the spacecraft typically sends regular radio signals as it journeys farther from our solar system. However, in November 2023, these signals suddenly became garbled, making it impossible for scientists to decipher any useful data.
In March, engineers at NASA sent a command prompt to Voyager 1 in an attempt to retrieve information from its flight data subsystem (FDS). Upon analysing the spacecraft response, they discovered that FDS’s memory had been corrupted. Specifically, a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected memory is suspected to be malfunctioning.
According to Live Science, NASA has declared that the corrupted memory chip may have been damaged by energetic particles from space or simply worn out after 46 years of operation. Despite the uncertainty surrounding that cause, engineers are confident that they can find a workaround to bypass the faulty chip and restore Voyager 1’s ability to transmit readable information from beyond our solar system.
Voyager 1 has a rich history, having explored Jupiter and Saturn in the late 1970s and early 1980s before embarking on its journey into interstellar space in 2012. It now serves as a valuable tool for studying the conditions beyond the sun's protective magnetic field, known as the hemisphere, which encompasses our solar system.
With radio signals taking around 22.5 hours to reach Earth from the spacecraft, Voyager 1 experiences severe communication delays given its current position, which is more than 15 billion miles away from the planet.
