NASA Engineers Have Figured Out Why Voyager 1 Was Sending Garbled Data

Earlier this yr, the Voyager 1 spacecraft—over 14 billion miles from Earth—began sending NASA some wacky knowledge. Now, engineers with the area company have recognized and solved the difficulty, and no, it wasn’t aliens.

The unusual knowledge was coming from Voyager 1’s perspective articulation and management system, which is answerable for sustaining the spacecraft’s orientation because it hurtles by way of interstellar area at about 38,000 miles per hour.

The garbled telemetry knowledge meant that Voyager 1 was speaking details about its location and orientation that didn’t match up with the doable true location and orientation of the spacecraft. Otherwise, the probe was behaving usually, as was its partner-in-crime, Voyager 2. Both spacecraft launched in the summertime of 1977, and Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object within the universe.

“The spacecraft are both almost 45 years old, which is far beyond what the mission planners anticipated. We’re also in interstellar space – a high-radiation environment that no spacecraft have flown in before,” stated Suzanne Dodd, Voyager’s challenge supervisor, when the issue first emerged.

“A mystery like this is sort of par for the course at this stage of the Voyager mission,” Dodd added.

Now, NASA engineers have realized why the perspective articulation and management system was sending out gibberish knowledge. The system started sending the telemetry by way of a defective laptop aboard Voyager 1, and the pc corrupted the data earlier than it could possibly be learn out on Earth.

The Voyager 1 workforce merely had the spacecraft begin sending knowledge to the correct laptop, correcting the issue. They’re unsure why the system started sending the telemetry into the defective laptop to start with.

“We’re happy to have the telemetry back,” Dodd stated in a NASA JPL release. “We’ll do a full memory readout of the AACS and look at everything it’s been doing. That will help us try to diagnose the problem that caused the telemetry issue in the first place.”

The excellent news is that the defective laptop doesn’t appear to be going HAL 9000 on Voyager 1; the area probe is in any other case in good well being. On September 5, the mission will have a good time its forty fifth yr, a milestone achieved by Voyager 2 on August 20.

Since the telemetry problem was first made public, Voyager 1 has traveled another 100,000,000 miles. It’s a small, technical repair for people, however one which ensures we will maintain observe of the intrepid area probe because it continues its extraordinary journey into deep area.

More: Voyager 2 Team Releases First Scientific Data on Interstellar Space