NASA’s pioneering Voyager 1 spacecraft has a memory problem. The space agency has been troubleshooting the elderly machine since it began sending backThe glitch paused Voyager 1’s science work and kicked off a long-distance diagnosis process. The team traced the issue to the flight data subsystem, a computer that talks to the spacecraft’s telemetry modulation unit to send science and engineering data to Earth. The data came back unintelligible.
Voyager 1’s position so far away from home creates a lot of challenges when it comes to fixing problems. NASA talks to the spacecraft over a distance of over 15 billion miles. It takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to reach Voyager 1 and it takes an equally long time to receive a response. It’s troubleshooting in slow motion. It also means figuring out the exact cause of the glitch is mostly educated guesswork. It could be damage or it could be a matter of age.
There’s reason for optimism, though Voyager 1 won’t make a quick recovery. “Although it may take weeks or months, engineers are optimistic they can find a way for the FDS to operate normally without the unusable memory hardware, which would enable Voyager 1 to begin returning science and engineering data again,” NASA said.
Voyager 1 has made an unprecedented journey across space. It launched in 1977 on an initial mission to study our solar system and visit Jupiter and Saturn. That was just the beginning. The resilient spacecraft kept on going and eventually entered interstellar space in 2012. It was the first human-made object to venture into the unexplored territory outside our solar system.