Engineers Solve Data Glitch on NASA’s Voyager 1

Engineers have repaired a concern affecting information from NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft. Back this year, the probe’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS), that keeps Voyager 1’s antenna pointed at Earth, started sending garbled information regarding its health and activities to mission controllers, despite operating normally. The rest of the probe also seemed healthy as it continued to collect and return science information.

The group has since located the source of the garbled data: The AACS had started sending the telemetry information through an onboard computer known to have stopped working years earlier, and the computer corrupted the information.

Suzanne Dodd, Voyager’s project supervisor, said that when they suspected this was the issue, they decided to try a low-risk solution: commanding the AACS to resume sending the information to the right computer.

Engineers do not still know why the AACS began routing telemetry data to the incorrect computer; however, it likely received a faulty command generated by another onboard computer. If that is the case, it would show there is a concern somewhere else on the spacecraft. The group will continue to search for that underlying issue, but they do not think it is a damage to the long-term health of Voyager 1.

“We are happy to have the telemetry back,” said Dodd. “We will do a full memory readout of the AACS and look at everything it’s been doing. That will assist us in trying to diagnose the problem that caused the telemetry issue in the first place. So we are cautiously optimistic, but we still have more investigating to do.”

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have been exploring our solar system for forty-five years. Both probes are currently in interstellar space, the region outside the heliopause, or the bubble of energetic particles and also magnetic fields from the Sun.

Read the original article on JPL NASA.