After months of sending unusable data to mission control, there's finally hope for the Voyager 1 spacecraft. NASA engineers have identified the cause of the mission's strange anomaly and believe they can help the interstellar probe transmit data in readable form again.
Engineers from NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory consider, that the Voyager 1 spacecraft is sending nonsense data through damaged memory hardware in the spacecraft's Flight Data Acquisition System (FDS).
The team suspects that one chip responsible for storing the damaged portion of the FDS memory is malfunctioning.
The FDS collects data from Voyager's science instruments, as well as engineering data about the state of the spacecraft, and combines them into a single packet that is transmitted to Earth through one of the probe's subsystems, the Telemetry Modulation Unit (TMU), in binary code.
FDS and TMU have difficulty communicating with each other. As a result, the TMU sends data to mission control in a repeating pattern of ones and zeros. NASA engineers aren't exactly sure what damaged the FDS memory hardware — they think the chip was hit by a high-energy particle from space, or it's simply worn out after 46 years of operation.
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, less than a month after its twin probe Voyager 2 began its own journey into space. The probe entered interstellar space in August 2012, becoming the first spacecraft to leave the heliosphere.
The problem first arose in May 2022, when the probe suddenly began sending nonsensical Orientation and Attitude Control (AACS) data. Engineers solved the problem by sending telemetry data through one of the spacecraft's other computers. In December 2023, the problem recurred.
On March 1, the team sent a test request to the spacecraft's data acquisition system, a team that gently nudges the FDS to use different sequences in its software package to identify the damaged partition. Two days later, Voyager 1 sent a signal containing data from the entire FDS memory, which helped the team determine the source of the failure by comparing it with the previous one to find inconsistencies in the code.
Using the readout, the team confirmed that about 3% of the FDS memory was corrupted, preventing the computer from performing normal operations.
Engineers hope to solve the problem by developing a way for the FDS to function without a damaged memory block, allowing Voyager 1 to continue transmitting useful data.
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