The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) of the American space agency NASA is cheering exuberantly: NASA can once again check the status of the Voyager 1 space probe. The spacecraft has been exploring our solar system for more than 46 years, a staggering 24 billion kilometers from Earth. It is the farthest man-made object in space ever.
Since November, Voyager 1’s communications have consisted of nothing but nonsense. The binary code, with which the space probe communicates with NASA, was no longer logical, causing it to send unreadable data to Earth.
The spacecraft could still receive commands and functioned normally. After months of “inventive detective work”, JPL engineers managed to find out exactly where things had gone wrong.
Through Voyager 1 we found out what Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune look like. — © getty
In early March, the Voyager mission team gave the probe a digital ‘poke’. When the system returned a readout of the memory, engineers discovered that the chip responsible for storing the memory had failed. The loss of the software code rendered the scientific and technical data unusable.
Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to move the affected code elsewhere in memory, but that was easier said than done. “It is a hugely ingenious job to find out what the exact problem is from such a great distance and then adjust it,” says space engineer Stijn Ilsen. “It takes 22.5 hours for the change in software to reach Voyager and another 22.5 hours to get a response from it.”
They waited anxiously for two days, but in the end the mission team could breathe a sigh of relief: they received useful information from the space probe. In a next step, engineers will also restore other software so that Voyager can once again send readable scientific data.
Planetary pioneering work
On September 5, 1977, just two weeks after sister probe Voyager 2, Voyager 1 began its journey through space. “Both spacecraft have done incredible pioneering work in exploring the outer reaches of our solar system,” Ilsen explains. “Through Voyager 1 and 2, we learned what Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune look like, even though they use cameras from the 1970s.”
“Voyager 1 converts the natural radioactive decay of plutonium into electricity that powers the systems,” says Ilsen. “But because the radiation released is becoming less and less, the amount of energy generated is also decreasing. At some point the spacecraft will no longer have enough electricity and NASA will no longer be able to make contact.”
Voyager 1 and 2 could remain within the range of the Deep Space Network until about 2036, depending on how much power the spacecraft still has to transmit a signal to Earth.
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