In May, NASA scientists said the Voyager 1 spacecraft was sending inaccurate data from it height control system. The mysterious bug still persists, according to the mission’s engineering team. To find a solution, engineers are now looking for decades-old clues.
Voyager 1 was launched along with its twin Voyager 2 in 1977 with a design life of 5 years Study Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and its moons.
After nearly 45 years in space, both spacecraft are still in service. In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first man-made object to venture beyond the limits of our Sun’s influence known as the heliosphere and into interstellar space. He is here now 14.5 billion miles from Earth and sending data from outside the solar system.
“Nobody thought it would take this long,” Susan Dodd, project manager for the Voyager mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Insider. “And here we are.”
Voyager 1 was designed and built in the early 1970s, complicating efforts to fix spacecraft problems.
Although current Voyager engineers have some documents—or command media, the technical term for paperwork detailing spacecraft design and procedures—from the early mission days, other important documents may have been lost or misplaced.
An engineer works on an instrument for one of NASA’s Voyager spacecraft on November 18, 1976.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
According to Dodd, thousands of engineers worked on the project during the first 12 years of the Voyager mission. “When they retired in the ’70s and ’80s, there wasn’t much motivation to have a library of project documents,” added Dodd. “People would take their boxes to their garage.” On recent missions, NASA keeps more robust documentary records.
There are some boxes of documents and diagrams kept outside of JPL, and Dodd and the rest of the Voyager wizards can request access to these records. Still, it can be a challenge. “To have that information, you need to know who’s working on that area of the project,” Dodd said.
For the latest Voyager 1 bug, mission engineers had to specifically look for boxes under the names of the engineers who helped design the altitude control system. “It’s a time-consuming process,” Dodd said.
The spacecraft’s altitude control system, which sends telemetry data to NASA, indicates Voyager 1’s direction in space and keeps the spacecraft’s high-gain antenna pointed at Earth so it can send the data home.
“Telemetry data is basically a case of system health,” Dodd said. However, according to Dodd, the telemetry readings that spacecraft operators receive from the system are skewed, meaning they don’t know if the altitude control system is working properly.
An engineer builds a large, high-gain Voyager dish antenna on July 9, 1976.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
So far, Dodd said, Voyager engineers haven’t been able to find a root cause for the malfunction, largely because they mightn’t reset the system. Dodd and her team believe this is due to the aging of a part. “Not everything works forever, not even in space,” she said.
The Voyager glitch can also be affected by its position in interstellar space. According to Dodd, spacecraft data suggests that high-energy charged particles exist in interstellar space. “It’s unlikely that either of them would hit the spacecraft, but if they did, they might do more damage to the electronics,” Dodd said, adding, “We can’t pinpoint that as the source of the anomaly, but it might be.” a factor.”
Despite the spacecraft’s orientation problems, it’s still receiving and executing commands from Earth and its antenna is still pointed at us. “We didn’t see any degradation in signal strength,” Dodd said.
as part of Continuous power management voltage That has escalated in recent years, with engineers shutting down the non-technical systems aboard Voyager’s sensors, like the heaters on the scientific instruments, in hopes of keeping them running through 2030.
Voyager 1 gazed at Saturn on November 16, 1980 to give this unique perspective of its rings.
NASA/JPL
From the discovery of unknown moons and rings to the first direct evidence of the heliosphere, Voyager-Mission Help scientists understand the universe. “We want the mission to last as long as possible because the scientific data is so valuable,” Dodd said.
“It’s really remarkable that both vehicles are still operational – some glitches, but both are working very well and still sending out such valuable data,” Dodd said, adding, “They’re still talking to us.”