WASHINGTON — A NASA official says he’s optimistic that an issue with the Voyager 1 spacecraft that has stored it from transmitting intelligible knowledge for months will be resolved.
Talking at a March 20 assembly of the Nationwide Academies’ Committee on Photo voltaic and House Physics, Joseph Westlake, director of NASA’s heliophysics division, mentioned it appeared potential to repair the pc drawback on the practically 50-year-old spacecraft that has disrupted operations since final November.
“I really feel like we’re on a path now to decision,” he mentioned. “They’re on the fitting path and I feel we’re going to get to a degree the place Voyager 1 goes to proceed, alive and kicking in area.”
Spacecraft controllers first seen an issue with the spacecraft in November, when the information transmitted by the spacecraft was unusable. Engineers concluded that the issue was with an onboard laptop referred to as the flight knowledge system (FDS), which collects knowledge from the spacecraft’s devices and different spacecraft telemetry.
A number of elements have hampered efforts to appropriate the issue. Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is now greater than 24 billion kilometers from Earth, which suggests it takes 22.5 hours for alerts to journey between Earth and the spacecraft. Not one of the individuals who developed the FDS within the early to mid Nineteen Seventies can be found to help now, so the undertaking has needed to flip to documentation to assist determine the issue.
NASA introduced March 13 progress in fixing the FDS when a command referred to as a “poke” was transmitted to Voyager, and the spacecraft responded by sending again a readout of its reminiscence. The company mentioned on the time it should evaluate that readout to 1 transmitted earlier than the issue to assist determine the problem.
Westlake mentioned on the committee assembly that the issue seems to be a corrupted reminiscence unit on the spacecraft. “It’s a component failure on one of many reminiscences they usually’re in search of a method to transfer a pair hundred phrases of software program from one area to a different within the flight laptop,” he mentioned. A phrase is 2 bytes.
He didn’t estimate how lengthy it might take to make these software program modifications. NASA, in its newest assertion in regards to the spacecraft, mentioned that utilizing the FDS reminiscence readout “to plot a possible answer and try and put it into motion will take time.”
Associated