Debugging the Voyager 1 From a Light Day Away
Denise Hill, writing on NASA’s The Sun Spot blog:
Since November 2023, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending
a steady radio signal to Earth, but the signal does not contain
usable data. The source of the issue appears to be with one of
three onboard computers, the flight data subsystem (FDS), which is
responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before
it’s sent to Earth by the telemetry modulation unit.
On March 3, the Voyager mission team saw activity from one section
of the FDS that differed from the rest of the computer’s
unreadable data stream. The new signal was still not in the format
used by Voyager 1 when the FDS is working properly, so the team
wasn’t initially sure what to make of it. But an engineer with the
agency’s Deep Space Network, which operates the radio antennas
that communicate with both Voyagers and other spacecraft traveling
to the Moon and beyond, was able to decode the new signal and
found that it contains a readout of the entire FDS memory. […]
Because Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles (24 billion
kilometers) from Earth, it takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to
reach the spacecraft and another 22.5 hours for the probe’s
response to reach antennas on the ground. So the team received the
results of the command on March 3. On March 7, engineers began
working to decode the data, and on March 10, they determined that
it contains a memory readout.
Remind me never to complain about anything I’ve had to debug again.
★
Denise Hill, writing on NASA’s The Sun Spot blog:
Since November 2023, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending
a steady radio signal to Earth, but the signal does not contain
usable data. The source of the issue appears to be with one of
three onboard computers, the flight data subsystem (FDS), which is
responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before
it’s sent to Earth by the telemetry modulation unit.
On March 3, the Voyager mission team saw activity from one section
of the FDS that differed from the rest of the computer’s
unreadable data stream. The new signal was still not in the format
used by Voyager 1 when the FDS is working properly, so the team
wasn’t initially sure what to make of it. But an engineer with the
agency’s Deep Space Network, which operates the radio antennas
that communicate with both Voyagers and other spacecraft traveling
to the Moon and beyond, was able to decode the new signal and
found that it contains a readout of the entire FDS memory. […]
Because Voyager 1 is more than 15 billion miles (24 billion
kilometers) from Earth, it takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to
reach the spacecraft and another 22.5 hours for the probe’s
response to reach antennas on the ground. So the team received the
results of the command on March 3. On March 7, engineers began
working to decode the data, and on March 10, they determined that
it contains a memory readout.
Remind me never to complain about anything I’ve had to debug again.