Last month I reported on what looked to be the sad demise of humanity’s first interstellar space probe, Voyager-1, which is now over 15 billion miles distant from its planet of origin, and still moving away from us at a speed of 38,000 mph. An apparent onboard computer glitch had reduced its data stream back to Earth to the equivalent of a galactic dial tone, and any hope of reestablishing communication with the errant craft seemed increasingly unlikely. Nonetheless, the engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab and Deep Space Network kept trying, and according to this report from Gizmodo their efforts may have met with some success:
On March 3, the team behind the Voyager 1 mission received a promising signal from the spacecraft’s flight data system (FDS). Although it wasn’t in the format regularly used by Voyager 1 when the spacecraft is operating normally, it was still different than the unreadable data stream that the mission has been transmitting since it developed an odd glitch in November 2023.
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The mission team was initially confused by the new message, but an engineer at NASA’s Deep Space Network, radio antennas that the space agency uses to communicate with its deep space missions, decoded the signal and found that it contains a readout of the entire FDS memory, NASA wrote in a blog update.
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“The FDS memory includes its code, or instructions for what to do, as well as variables, or values used in the code that can change based on commands or the spacecraft’s status,” the space agency said.
Voyager 1 transmitted this data in response to the team sending a “poke” to the spacecraft’s data system on March 1, or a command that gently prompts FDS “to try different sequences in its software package in case the issue could be resolved by going around a corrupted section,” according to NASA.
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For months, things have been looking bleak for the Voyager 1 mission, which has been cruising through the cosmos for more than 46 years. With the new signal, however, the team may be able to pinpoint the exact source of the glitch by comparing this memory readout with a previous one to look for discrepancies in the code.
Let’s keep our fingers crossed that useful communication can indeed be reestablished in the next few weeks or months, even though the Plutonium power sources that keep both Voyager-1 and its sister probe Voyager-2 (which continues to send data back to Earth normally) operating in the depths of space will eventually run down in the next few decades to the point they will no longer be able to transmit any further data on the interstellar medium they will continue to traverse for eons without end. But who knows, perhaps by then we might even have a working Warp-drive with which to explore the cosmos?
