In November last year, Voyager 1 began transmitting gibberish to Earth. The binary code (the series of 0’s and 1’s he uses to communicate with Earth) no longer made sense. Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) tried to figure out what was going on. And that took several months of “inventive detective work”.
In March, the Voyager team sent a digital “poke” to Voyager 1. The flight data-tracking system sent back a complete readout of its memory. Based on this, engineers saw that there was damaged code on a chip. This prevented Voyager 1 from being able to properly “package” its scientific and technical data before sending it to Earth.
Repairing or repairing a chip with a broken code is obviously not possible. The engineers therefore decided to forward the broken code to another location in memory. And that’s easier said than done, because the technology on Voyager 1 is very old.
On April 18, engineers from Earth sent a fix Through. And then it was two days of nail biting. After all, it takes 22.5 hours to reach Voyager, and then another 22.5 hours for Voyager to send back a response.
Tags: Relief NASA #46yearold space probe Voyager longer transmits gibberish Earth
