They solved a mysterious gibberish from space. One trick was enough
For over five months, Voyager 1 has been able to transmit only gibberish to Earth. All because of the failure she experienced in November. NASA specialists have just brought it back to life.
Voyager 1 has been sending data from interstellar space back to Earth for almost fifty years after its launch in 1977. But in November, a glitch appeared that left the spacecraft's data on the state of its own systems were incomprehensible to NASA scientists monitoring him. The breakthrough came on April 20, when scientists restored legible communication. The survey has already confirmed that still travels safely in space.
The Voyager mission can't last forever
NASA's Voyager flight team discovered the flaw in November and worked to fix the problem through code. As it turned out, she caused problems single chip failure in the flight data subsystemthe part responsible for transmitting data back to Earth. The broken chip contained some of the computer code necessary to transmit functional data. Because of this, the scientific and engineering data transmitted by the spacecraft was useless. But the NASA team worked on solving this mystery for several arduous months of trying to communicate with the space traveler. Only after finding the answer did the team decide to reprogram the station in such a way that place the damaged code again in another place in the satellite's memory – DailyMail reports, citing NASA. The next step is to enable the re-upload of scientific data.
Hi, it's me. – V1 https://t.co/jgGFBfxIOe
— NASA Voyager (@NASAVoyager) April 22, 2024
However, it is worth adding that Voyager 1 probably won't work for much longer. According to the NASA team, the instruments needed to transmit data about its surroundings will work at least until next year. The agency believes it will be able to track its location until 2036. Archaic equipment for our time does not help in keeping the satellite alive. Internal computers have 240,000 times less memory than today's smartphones. In turn, the on-board tape recorder is not much different from the equipment typical of the 1970s. Additionally, contact with the probe is very difficult. You currently have to wait almost two days for a response.
