WASHINGTON — A NASA official is hopeful that a problem with the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which has prevented it from sending understandable data for months, can be solved.
Joseph Westlake, director of NASA’s heliophysics division, expressed optimism at a meeting of the National Academies’ Committee on Solar and Space Physics on March 20, stating that it seemed possible to address the computer problem on the nearly 50-year-old spacecraft that has caused disruptions since last November.
“I feel like we’re on a path now to resolution,” he said. “They’re on the right path and I think we’re going to get to a point where Voyager 1 is going to continue, alive and kicking in space.”
In November, spacecraft controllers noticed a problem with the data transmitted by the spacecraft, which was deemed unusable. Engineers determined that the issue was with an onboard computer known as the flight data system (FDS), responsible for collecting data from the spacecraft’s instruments and other telemetry.
Several challenges have hindered efforts to rectify the problem. Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is currently over 24 billion kilometers from Earth, resulting in a 22.5-hour signal travel time between Earth and the spacecraft. The individuals who developed the FDS in the early to mid 1970s are no longer available to assist, so the project has had to rely on documentation to identify the problem.
NASA publicized progress in resolving the FDS issue on March 13. There was progress made in fixing the FDS when a command termed a “poke” was sent to Voyager, and the spacecraft responded by transmitting its memory readout. At that time, the agency announced its plan to compare that readout with one transmitted prior to the problem in order to identify the issue. Westlake mentioned at the committee meeting that the issue seems to be a corrupted memory unit on the spacecraft. “It’s a part failure on one of the memories and they’re looking for a way to move a couple hundred words of software from one region to another in the flight computer,” he said. A word is two bytes.
He did not provide an estimate for how long it would take to make these software changes. NASA, in its latest update about the spacecraft, stated that using the FDS memory readout “to devise a potential solution and attempt to put it into action will take time.”
He did not estimate how long it would take to make those software changes. NASA, in its latest statement about the spacecraft, said that using the FDS memory readout “to devise a potential solution and attempt to put it into action will take time.”
