Posted on 04/23/2024 9:04:41 AM PDT by Red Badger
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is depicted in this artist’s concept traveling through interstellar space, or the space between stars, which it entered in 2012. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
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After some inventive sleuthing, the mission team can — for the first time in five months — check the health and status of the most distant human-made object in existence.
For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars).
Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed that the issue was tied to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth.
After receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in five months, members of the Voyager flight team celebrate in a conference room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on April 20. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.
So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.
The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.
During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.
Voyager 2 continues to operate normally. Launched over 46 years ago, the twin Voyager spacecraft are the longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history. Before the start of their interstellar exploration, both probes flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune.
Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA.
I think the worst realization is that they only care about the paperwork when they want to care about the paperwork. Plenty of time someone important just ignores everything, does whatever they want, and says, “Screw the paperwork.” But the little people must slave away relentlessly on that massive pile of paperwork which, at a deep level, simply doesn’t matter. Except when they want to screw someone with it. Paperwork is not treated as a useful tool. It’s a weapon.
I tip my hat to your dad and his team. Very, very, very impressive engineering/manufacturing feat.
Thanks. I was in college at the time and Dad showed me some amazing technology and testing of the plutonium casks and their survivability if the rocket crashed on liftoff. Of course, at the time I didn’t have a full appreciation of the entire project. I sure wish Dad were here so we could talk about it more.
He worked on some amazing spacecraft projects from the guidance system on the Polaris missile, to the NIBUS Satellites and the Earth Technology Resource Satellite (”ERTS”) later renamed Landsat 1. He ended his career with a project so important to national security that all he could tell me was “Son, you wouldn’t believe how important this is to national security.” I later met an Air Force Captain who worked at the Onizuka Air Force Station (nicknamed the “Blue Cube”) and knew of my dad. All he could say was “Your dad was right.”
Call Clint Eastwood.
Nasa talking to space craft a billion miles away, and I can’t get my cell phone to work when I want it or stop butt calling people when I don’t want it to work.
they only care about the paperwork when they want to care about the paperwork.
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Bureaucrats Always care about paperwork: that’s how the justify their existence and how they get promoted.
It’s a shame that V-GER will merge with Lt. Ilia and a pedophile 300 years from now.
Very cool.
“I can’t get my cell phone to work when I want it or stop butt calling people when I don’t want it to work.”
LOL...I hear ya! Don’t look at the screen cross-eyed or it will call somebody. And don’t you dare brush the screen with your finger!
Persia was sofa king hot
Ahhh no so fast!! lol... theres one loser standing in the doorway with his little face mask on!!
I wonder what science data is collected out there?
Interstellar dust concentration? Random noise? Minute solar heat readings? How far to the next gas station?
I wonder if they can correlate that with the increase and decrease of ice cover in the Arctic?
If you want to get a “science study” published, that’s what it should say :) They’ll snap it right up!
BETCHA THERE ARE NO DEI MEMBERS ON THIS TEAM...
ONLY SMART PEOPLE
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