Almost four months after NASA’s Voyager 1 probe stopped sending scientific and technical data to Earth, unrest is growing at the US space agency. “Honestly, I’m very worried,” NPR (National Public Radio) quotes a person in charge of the probe furthest from Earth as saying. The New York Times has already done so a kind of obituary published, but, like NPR, refers to statements from NASA officials that not all options have been exhausted.
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According to project manager Suzanne Dodd, there is still a list of measures that can be tried. In trying to repair the probe remotely, NASA will probably make increasingly risky attempts in the next few weeks.
Motivating work with old circuit diagrams
In December, NASA announced that one of the three computers on board Voyager 1 had been sending junk data since November. The Flight Data System (FDS) is responsible, among other things, for collecting data from the scientific instruments and packing them together with technical information into packages that are sent to Earth. Since the problems began, only a carrier signal has arrived on Earth that confirms that the probe is active. There are no indications of other errors; In addition, the experts could have confirmed that the probe was receiving commands from Earth. At the beginning of February, NASA finally announced that it would switch the probe to a different mode in order to isolate the error. That probably wasn’t successful.
NPR quotes project scientist Linda Spilker Now with the insight that the team is having a lot of fun trying to fix the problem. There would be sticky notes with schematics all over the wall, and everyone would try to get into the heads of the people who designed the probe in the 1960s and 1970s. Today’s team wants to find out why they did something exactly that way and how we could find out exactly what was going on. Spilker is therefore cautiously optimistic: “There is so much creativity here.” At the same time, she acknowledges that it is a laborious process that could take weeks or months. “We’ll keep trying and it won’t be quick,” added Dodd.
Attempting to isolate and correct the error on Voyager 1 is complicated by several circumstances. Unlike current probes, there are no simulators on Earth for this old model; To solve the problem, decades-old paper instructions have to be found and combed through. Many of the people who developed and built the device have long since retired or died. The work is made more difficult by the enormous distance of the probe: signals there take well over 22 hours, and it takes just as long for a response to arrive on Earth. Added to this is the age of the probes themselves; something can fail at any time.
In use for decades
Voyager 1 and its sister probe Voyager 2 were launched in 1977 and were able to take advantage of a rare constellation for their journey in which the four largest planets in the solar system came particularly close to each other. Both visited Jupiter and gained momentum from it to Saturn, where their paths diverged: Voyager 1 catapulted out of the plane of the solar system, Voyager 2 set course for Uranus and Neptune. Originally only a four-year mission was planned; They have now been on the road for 46 years and are still active. The Voyager program is one of NASA’s greatest successes. Most recently, the Voyager twins reached interstellar space – because there were so many failures with space probes at the time, there were two of every important one.
(mho)