The furthest object man has ever sent into space has finally reconnected with NASA, as the Voyager 1 spacecraft made contact with Earth for the first time in five months.
Five months ago, communication with the spacecraft, which is about 15 billion miles from Earth, ceased due to issues with the 46-year-old Voyager 1, after its flight data system’s telemetry modulation unit started sending a repeating pattern of code that was indecipherable.
The flight data system is responsible for collecting information from the spacecraft’s science instruments, which it then bundles with engineering data that reflects its current health status.
However, engineers at NASA were able to come up with a solution, and it received its first coherent data about the health and status of Voyager 1’s engineering systems on April 20.
“Today was a great day for Voyager 1,” Linda Spilker, a Voyager project scientist at JPL, said in a statement Saturday. “We’re back in communication with the spacecraft. And we look forward to getting science data back.”
The solution was found after engineers discovered a problem with a single chip that was corrupting 3% of the Voyager 1’s memory and causing communication errors.
This led the spacecraft’s mission team to send commands to try and restart its computer system.
After sending a command called “poke” in an attempt to get the flight data system to run different software sequences and having NASA’s Deep Space Network decode a section of code that was unlike the garbled data, the team discovered the issue with the chip.
The reason behind the chip’s failure is unknown, but its loss of code caused the probe’s science and engineering data to become corrupted and unusable.
So, in order to get things back to somewhat normal, the team decided to store the affected code from the chip elsewhere in the system’s memory, which included breaking it up to get things back up and communicating.
“To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole,” according to an update from NASA. “Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the (flight data system) memory needed to be updated as well.”
Thanks to the fix, NASA will once again gain insight into the universe, as Voyager 1 will be able to communicate with its mission team.
Currently, the probe is in uncharted territory along the outer reaches of the solar system, far outproducing its initial lifespan, expected to be just five years.
New data is expected to reach Earth within the coming weeks.
“We never know for sure what’s going to happen with the Voyagers, but it constantly amazes me when they just keep going,” Voyager Project Manager Suzanne Dodd said in a statement. “We’ve had many anomalies, and they are getting harder. But we’ve been fortunate so far to recover from them. And the mission keeps going. And younger engineers are coming onto the Voyager team and contributing their knowledge to keep the mission going.”