Voyager 1, a NASA spacecraft launched in 1977, had been sending signals to Earth continuously until it malfunctioned in November 2023. However, after months of diligent efforts to re-establish communication with the spacecraft, NASA engineers finally received decipherable data from Voyager 1 for the first time in five months, thanks to a creative solution devised to fix the corrupting memory in one of its three onboard computers.
Located more than 15 billion miles away from Earth, Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object in history. In August 2012, the spacecraft crossed into interstellar space after flying by Jupiter and Saturn and continues to collect information.
Voyager 1’s flight data system gathers scientific data from its instruments and combines it with engineering data, providing an overview of both its exploratory aobservations and current operational status. But in November, a minor glitch occurred within a chip in the probe’s flight data system, resulting in the disruption of both science and health data, rendering them incomprehensible. Although scientists could discern that the spacecraft was still operational from the transmission of an alternating pattern of nonsensical zeros and ones, the signal did provide engineers with any usable data that they could decipher.
Upon discovering the issue, NASA’s mission team attempted to restart Voyager 1’s computer system and gather more information to learn more about the root cause of the issue that was causing the data to be unusable. After the team tried to get the flight data system to run different software to find the cause of the glitch, they noticed that activity from one part of the system stood out from the rest of the jumbled data.
Upon deeper investigation, they were able to determine that 3% of memory on one of the probe’s three onboard computers had been corrupted. A single malfunctioning chip responsible for storing a portion of the data system’s memory was identified as the cause of the issue that had been preventing Voyager 1 from sending coherent updates about its operational and science data. Although the exact cause of the glitch remains unknown, the team speculated it could be the result of aging or exposure to radiation.
Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to store the affected code and divided it into sections to distribute it in different spots within the flight data system. After identifying the required code for the probe’s engineering data, engineers sent a radio signal to Voyager 1 instructing the code to a different location within the system’s memory.
Finally, on April 20, the team received the spacecraft’s response indicating that the creative and clever code modification had worked, and they would be able to receive usable data from Voyager 1 again soon.
While the team anticipates that it will be a few weeks before they receive science data from Voyager 1, they are eager to uncover the insights it holds.