WASHINGTON — The 4 tools on NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft are returning science information for the primary time since a pc malfunction closing November, as scientists hope to stay the challenge working for as much as any other decade.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory introduced June 13 that the 4 tools at the spacecraft, which measure plasma waves, magnetic fields and debris in interstellar house, have began returning information once more. Two of the tools began up in an instant after instructions had been despatched to the spacecraft Would possibly 19 whilst the opposite two required what JPL referred to as “some further paintings” to renew operations.
The tools were offline since November 2023, when a pc malfunction on board the spacecraft led to it to go back garbled information. A “tiger staff” of engineers traced the issue to a corrupted reminiscence chip in one of the crucial spacecraft’s computer systems, and rewrote tool to steer clear of the usage of that chip. That effort restored communications with the spacecraft in April.
“The tiger staff was once in a position to reprogram and relocate that code, first for the engineering portion of the knowledge modes coming from the spacecraft,” mentioned Linda Spilker, Voyager challenge scientist, at a June 13 assembly of the Outer Planets Research Workforce the place she introduced the tools had been operating once more. “We at the moment are getting science information again from all 4 Voyager 1 science tools.”
“That is the primary flight tool replace made to a spacecraft in interstellar house,” she added. “The closing time we actually did a lot with the flight tool was once previous to release.” Voyager 1 introduced in 1977.
With the spacecraft’s laptop now operating once more, the important thing issue restricting the lifetime of Voyager 1 and its dual, Voyager 2, is declining energy ranges. Every spacecraft loses about 4 watts in step with yr, a mixture of the decay in their plutonium-238 energy provides and degradation of the thermocouples that flip the warmth from that decay into energy.
Controllers have controlled the declining energy via turning off nonessential programs, together with warmers that had saved tools and different elements heat. “What’s taking place is that the spacecraft is turning into chilly, so we’ve got each an influence fear in addition to a thermal fear,” Spilker mentioned.
In the future, she mentioned the challenge should get started turning off tools themselves however was once hopeful that the spacecraft can proceed to function possibly into the following decade.
“With somewhat little bit of good fortune, it could be imaginable to proceed the Voyager spacecraft taking information out to the 2030s,” she mentioned. If Voyager 1 makes it to 2035, it’s going to be 200 astronomical devices, or about 30 billion kilometers, from the solar. It’s these days greater than 24 billion kilometers from the solar.
“At the moment, our focal point is to make it out to 2027,” she mentioned. “That would be the fiftieth anniversary of the release of each Voyager spacecraft.”
The announcement that Voyager 1’s tools had been returning information once more got here two days after JPL introduced the passing of Ed Stone, who served as Voyager’s challenge scientist from the challenge’s inception in 1972 till 2022, when he retired and was once changed via Spilker. Stone, a professor of physics at Caltech, additionally served as director of Caltech from 1991 to 2001.
“Ed Stone would steadily say all over the planetary flyby segment that we had a unprecedented alternative with the alignment of the planets and we seized it,” she mentioned of the “Grand Excursion” trajectory that enabled the Voyager spacecraft to fly via Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. “I might upload that each Voyagers nonetheless have uncommon alternatives, and Ed will proceed to clutch them.”
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