After NASA engineers devised a solution to the damaged chip, Voyager 1, which began gibbering in late 2023, finally returned to normal and returned readable and coherent data.
The Voyager 1 probe, which has been flying in space for 46 years, is the first man-made object to leave the solar system. It is currently about 24 billion kilometers away from us. However, it has shown more and more signs of aging in recent years. The latest problem appeared in 2023 November of the year.
At that time, the telemetry modulation unit of the Voyager 1 flight data system (FDS) began to transmit illegible and meaningless repetitive program codes. Although the probe had continued to transmit stable radio signals to the Earth for several months, the signal No usable data is carried.
After discovering the problem, the mission team tried to send a command to restart the spacecraft computer system. On March 1, the team sent a “poke” command to Voyager 1 to let the flight data system run different software sequences, hoping to find out the cause of the failure.
Memory is partially damaged
On March 3, the team noticed that some activity in the flight information system stood out from the cluttered data. Although the signal format was different from the format the team used to see when the flight information system was operating as expected, NASA engineers successfully decoded it and obtained the entire flight data. Data system memory reading.
By investigating the readings, the team determined the cause of Voyager 1’s gibbering: 3% of the flight information system’s memory was corrupted. A single chip responsible for storing part of the system’s memory (including some computer software code) was not functioning properly, and the code was missing. Voyager 1’s scientific engineering data became unusable.
The team said that although the cause of the chip failure is not yet clear, it may be due to wear or being hit by high-energy particles in space.
Since the chip could not be repaired, the team decided to divide the code affected by the damaged chip into multiple parts, transfer and store it to other locations in the flight information system memory, and send a command to the detector on April 18.
Voyager 1 returned good news on the 20th. The team received the first batch of consistent data in five months, announcing that Voyager 1 was back in normal operation and in good condition.
Just when everyone originally thought that the Voyager 1 mission was coming to an end, it was once again rescued from the dead by engineers. In the next few weeks, we will once again see the precious interstellar space data from the Voyager 1 detector.
(First image source: NASA)
Further reading:
Follow TechNews via Google News here
New scientific and technological knowledge, updated from time to time
