As NASA grapples with the Artemis 1 program, the agency has also solved another mystery. Indeed his Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched 45 years ago, transmits very mysterious data.
Why ? Here is the explanation. NASA engineers have found the bug that caused the four-decade-old spacecraft’s critical instruments to send “garbled” health information to mission controllers on Earth.
Voyager 1’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS), which keeps its antenna pointing toward Earth, began earlier this year to return information that did not reflect what what was really happening on board. The AACS system appeared to be functioning normally, but the data it returned was deemed invalid because it did not correspond to any possible state of the system.
The mystery is not entirely solved
Otherwise, the rest of the probe seemed to be in good health, as it continued to collect and send back scientific data.
But the agency said it found the source of the distorted information: a zombie computer that shouldn’t have been used to relay the telemetry data. “AACS had started sending telemetry data through an on-board computer that was known to have stopped working years ago, and the computer corrupted the information,” the company said. NASA in a press release.
Although NASA engineers fixed the problem, they still don’t know why the AACS started routing information through the non-functioning computer. However, they assume that the AACS probably received a faulty command from another on-board computer.
“We are happy to recover the telemetry”
NASA notes that if that other onboard computer generated a bad command, there could be a problem elsewhere in the spacecraft. Research is continuing to determine the nature of the underlying problem, but engineers believe it will not seriously affect its future.
“We are happy to have the telemetry back,” said Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd. “We’re going to do a full memory read of the AACS and look at everything it’s done. This will help us try to diagnose the issue that caused the telemetry issue in the first place. So we’re being proactive. cautious optimism, but we still have some research to do.”
Voyager 1 launched from Cape Canaveral in September 1977 and is now the furthest spacecraft from Earth, traveling through space about 14.5 billion miles (23.3 billion kilometers). The light would take about 20 hours to travel from the spacecraft.
Voyager 1 was the first man-made object to enter interstellar space, and in 1998 it overtook NASA’s Pioneer 10 to become the most distant man-made object. It reached interstellar space in August 2012 and performs, among other things, measurements of the density of matter in interstellar space. It will eventually exit the solar system, but not for a very, very long time.
Source: “ZDNet.com”