Engineers at NASA have pinpointed some corrupted reminiscence as the reason for Voyager 1’s troubles and are operating on a far flung repair to take care of the {hardware} drawback.
The veteran probe started sending unreadable information again to Earth in past due 2023, and engineers have attempted to know the character of the problem. Closing month, they despatched a command – a “poke” to the spacecraft’s Flight Knowledge Machine (FDS) – and the ensuing information flow contained a whole reminiscence unload from the pc.
The group used to be in a position to make use of this readout, which contained the pc’s code and variables, to establish that roughly 3 % of the FDS reminiscence have been corrupted. That corruption is fighting standard operation of the FDS, which is liable for packaging the probe’s engineering and science information ahead of it will get handed to the Telemetry Modulation Unit (TMU), the radio transmitter and is shipped again to Earth.
The Voyager group reckons {that a} unmarried chip liable for the corrupted portion of reminiscence is at fault, even supposing they are able to best make an educated wager in regards to what has took place.
Two main theories are that the chip has merely wiped out having spent 46 years in house, or that an vigorous particle would possibly have broken it.
As Voyager 1 is easily out of the achieve of any bodily intervention, the problem will wish to be addressed in tool.
In line with NASA: “Even though it’s going to take weeks or months, engineers are constructive they are able to be able for the FDS to function generally with out the unusable reminiscence {hardware}, which might permit Voyager 1 to start returning science and engineering information back.”
Laptop issues led to through cosmic rays and vigorous debris have lengthy challenged spacecraft designers. Some would possibly simply lead to somewhat turn, whilst others can go away satellites inoperable or broken.
Voyager 2 suffered somewhat turn in 2010, which led to issues of science information transmitted from the spacecraft and used to be traced to the FDS. A pc reset handled the issue.
This time, alternatively, the {hardware} seems to have develop into inoperative, requiring engineers to plot one thing extra difficult than a easy turn-it-off-and-on-again resolution. ®
