Voyager 1 Makes Stellar Comeback To Science Operations

Arthur T Knackerbracket has processed the following story:

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is back in action and conducting normal science operations for the first time since the veteran probe began spouting gibberish at the end of 2023.

All four of the spacecraft's remaining operational instruments are now returning usable data to Earth, according to NASA.

Some additional work is needed to tidy up the effects of the issue. Engineers need to resynchronize the timekeeping software of Voyager 1's three onboard computers to ensure that commands are executed at the correct times. Maintenance will also be performed on the digital tape recorder, which records some data from the plasma instrument for a six-monthly downlink to Earth.

As the 50th anniversary of Voyager 1's launch rapidly approaches, and with the probe now 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, restoring functionality is quite an engineering feat.

Voyager 1's woes began in November 2023, when the spacecraft stopped transmitting usable data back to Earth. Rather than engineering and science data, NASA found itself faced with a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes, as though the spacecraft was somehow stalled.

Engineers reckoned the issue lay with the Flight Data System (FDS) and in March sent a command - dubbed a "poke" - to get the FDS to try some other software sequences and thus circumvent whatever was causing the problem.

The result was a complete memory dump from the computer, which allowed engineers to pinpoint where the corruption had occurred. It appeared that a single chip was malfunctioning, and engineers were faced with the challenge of devising a software update that would work around the defective hardware.

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