For weeks, a team of JPL Voyager mission engineers have been receiving gibberish from the venerable Voyager 1, 15 billion miles away from Earth. But amid the concern, promising signs have emerged.
This artist’s concept depicts NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft entering interstellar space, or the space between stars. Interstellar space is dominated by the plasma, or ionized gas, that was ejected by the death of nearby giant stars millions of years ago. The environment inside our solar bubble is dominated by the plasma exhausted by our sun, known as the solar wind.
Now, well into its twilight years, Voyager 1 is very sick. But amid weeks of concern at JPL – where a mission team, dwindling in number, talks with the crafts – a hopeful sign has finally emerged. “The likely cause of the issue is some type of corrupted bit structure in the FDS computer. We don’t know where that corruption is,” explained Dr. Suzanne Dodd, project manager for the Voyager Interstellar Mission, who describes this issue as the most serious she’s seen since joining the team in 2010.
“So a lot of what the tiger team has had to do is go back and look through old documentation,” Dodd said. “Try to recreate how the code was done and why the code was done that way.”Once the team finally decides on the right command to send Voyager 1, it takes around 22.5 hours for that command to travel the 15 billion miles to the spacecraft. By the time a response is received on Earth, nearly two days have elapsed.
Jupiter, Saturn and Uranus were reached in quick succession, bringing 24-hour media attention to JPL once a year from 1979 to 1981. Eight years later, the mission reclaimed the spotlight when Voyager 2 flew by Neptune, completing Voyager’s primary mission. After photographing Neptune, the mission slipped into the shadows, dwindling in size as engineers and scientists moved on to other projects.
She pointed out that the Galilieo, Juno, Cassini and Europa Clipper missions “are built upon the discoveries of Voyager.”
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