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Published: 2022-09-05 16:28:00 Updated: 2022-09-05 16:32:39
Posted September 5, 2022 4:28 p.m. EDT Updated September 5, 2022 4:32 p.m. EDT
By Tony Rice, NASA Ambassador
Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory solved a data glitch onboard Voyager I in time for the missions 45th anniversary today, from 14.6 billion miles away.
The probe’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS), which keeps Voyager 1’s antenna pointed at Earth, began sending garbled information in May. Mission controllers determined it was otherwise operating normally and overall the probe appeared healthy as it continued to gather and return science data.
The problem was traced to misrouting of data by the AACS through an onboard computer that had stopped functioning years ago. The solution, according to Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd, was to command the AACS to resume sending the data to the right computer.
Engineers don’t yet know why the AACS started routing telemetry data to the incorrect computer, but it likely received a faulty command generated by another onboard computer. If that’s the case, it would indicate there is an issue somewhere else on the spacecraft. The team will continue to search for that underlying issue, but they don’t think it is a threat to the long-term health of Voyager 1.
Launched in 1977 the twin probes made a "Grand Tour" of the solar system before Voyager 1 turned up out of the plane of the solar system in 1980 after passing Saturn and Voyager 2 turn the opposite direction after passing Neptune 9 years later. Voyager 1 is the most distant human made object in space.
It crossed over the termination shock, or the boundary where the effects of gravity, the solar wind and our Sun's magnetic field are no longer felt and the spacecraft begins to experience those things more from other stars.
The three purpose built computers originally designed for the Viking Mars lander, the computer command system, flight data system, and attitude and articulation control system, total 68 kilobytes of memory, total. Today's Apple watches have 14,700 the RAM.
Like your laptop or smartphone, today's robotic missions store data in highly reliable solid state memory. When the Voyager probes can't directly stream the data to Earth, they store it on state of the art (at the time) magnetic tape. 45 years later and that same tape is still in use playing back data, about every other week on average, as recently as April 28 of this year according to NASA's Voyager Activity Schedule
As long as the hardware continues to last, NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN) will continue communicating with the Voyager probes, but their radioisotope thermoelectric generators are growing weaker, putting out about 4 watts less power each passing year. Engineers have been powering off science instruments starting with the cameras in 1990 to conserve power.
It is expected that power will hold out for at least one instrument can be kept on through about 2025. Both probes and their 23 watt transmitters, comparable in power to the light bulb in your refrigerator, will remain range of the DSN until 2036.
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