The Voyager 1, the most remote manmade vessel from Earth, has resumed effective communication with NASA following months of remote repair work on the 46-year-old space probe. In December, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the department responsible for producing and managing NASA’s robotic space vessels, reported that the probe, situated over 24 billion kilometers away, was returning undecipherable code.
By Monday, JPL had stated that through creative problem-solving, they had managed to obtain useful information on the health and operational status of Voyager 1’s engineering systems. The next goal, JPL stated, is facilitating the transmission of scientific data back to Earth. Despite the communication glitch, Voyager 1 apparently continued functioning as expected.
Voyager 1, which launched in 1977, had the original brief of conducting detailed examinations of Jupiter and Saturn over a period of five years. Nevertheless, the vessel’s expedition has carried on and is now nearing its fiftieth year of operation. In August 2012, Voyager 1 journeyed into interstellar territory, marking it as the first terrestrial object to leave the solar system. The probe is currently moving at a speed of 60,821km/hr.
The recent technical issue was tied to one of the three computers housed on the spacecraft, tasked with preparing scientific and engineering data for transmission to Earth. With a faulty chip irreparable, the JPL team chosen to relocate the flawed code, a complicated task given the outdated technology. The combined memory of Voyager 1 and its companion probe, Voyager 2, doesn’t exceed 70 kilobytes, approximately matching a low-resolution computer image, and they use traditional digital tape for recording data.
From Earth, a repair was sent to Voyager 1 on 18th April, however, the response time for success confirmation took two days owing to the 22 and a half hours it takes for a radio signal to reach the spacecraft and a similar duration for a reply to be received on Earth. Upon receiving a response from Voyager 1 on April 20th, the mission flight team at JPL declared that the repair had been effective. A photograph uploaded by JPL depicts jubilant Voyager flight team members celebrating the success with laptops, notepads and doughnuts scattered around the conference room table.
Chris Hadfield, a retired Canadian astronaut who commanded the International Space Station and participated in two space shuttle missions, drew a parallel between the JPL mission and remote vintage car maintenance. He highlighted the enormity of the task by asking people to visualise a malfunctioning computer chip in their distant vehicle, a whopping 15 billion miles away, in the middle of interstellar space. Furthermore, he praised the expert team at NASA who rectified the core issue of the Voyager probe.
The Voyagers, 1 and 2, are renowned for their multiple scientific revelations, such as intricate analysis of Saturn, discovery of Jupiter’s rings, unearthing volcanism on one of Jupiter’s moons, Io, and identifying 23 new moons around external planets. Relying on the heat conversion from the natural radioactive decay of plutonium into electricity rather than solar panels, due to their distant trajectory from the sun, powers these spacecraft.
Anticipating to gather data from the two Voyager spacecraft for several more years, NASA engineers predict that communication will be lost in roughly a decade as the probes travel further out of range, depending on their power output. Voyager 2 trails slightly behind its counterpart in terms of distance and speed.
In approximately 40,000 years, the Voyagers are expected to encounter two stars at a relatively short distance on an astronomical scale. Voyager 1 will be approximately 1.7 light years from a star in Ursa Minor constellation, while Voyager 2 will be similarly near to a star, Ross 248, located in the Andromeda constellation.