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Mystery issue experienced on NASA’s Voyager 1 probe from 1977
Voyager 1 continues to function nicely, regardless of its superior age and 14.5 billion-mile distance (23.3 billion kilometers) from Earth. And it could actually obtain and execute instructions despatched from NASA, in addition to collect and ship again science information.
However the readouts from the angle articulation and management system, which management the spacecraft’s orientation in house, do not match up with what Voyager is definitely doing. The angle articulation and management system, or AACS, ensures that the probe’s high-gain antenna stays pointed at Earth so Voyager can ship information again to NASA.
Resulting from Voyager’s interstellar location, it takes mild 20 hours and 33 minutes to journey a technique, so the decision and response of 1 message between NASA and Voyager takes two days.
Thus far, the Voyager staff believes the AACS remains to be working, however the instrument’s information readouts appear random or unimaginable. The system concern hasn’t triggered something to place the spacecraft into “protected mode” to this point. That is when solely important operations happen so engineers can diagnose a problem that will put the spacecraft in danger.
And Voyager’s sign is as robust as ever, which means the antenna remains to be pointed to Earth. The staff is making an attempt to find out if this incorrect information is coming straight from this instrument or if one other system is inflicting it.
“Till the character of the difficulty is healthier understood, the staff can not anticipate whether or not this may have an effect on how lengthy the spacecraft can gather and transmit science information,” in accordance with a NASA launch.
“A thriller like that is form of par for the course at this stage of the Voyager mission,” stated Suzanne Dodd, mission supervisor for Voyager 1 and a couple of at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in an announcement.
“The spacecraft are each virtually 45 years previous, which is much past what the mission planners anticipated. We’re additionally in interstellar house — a high-radiation atmosphere that no spacecraft have flown in earlier than. So there are some huge challenges for the engineering staff. However I believe if there is a strategy to resolve this concern with the AACS, our staff will discover it.”
If the staff would not decide the supply of the difficulty, they might simply adapt to it, Dodd stated. Or if they will discover it, the difficulty could also be solved by making a software program change or counting on a redundant {hardware} system.
Voyager has already relied on backup techniques to final so long as it has. In 2017, the probe fired thrusters that have been used throughout its preliminary planetary encounters throughout the Seventies — and so they nonetheless labored after remaining unused for 37 years.
The getting older probes produce little or no energy per yr, so subsystems and heaters have been turned off through the years in order that essential techniques and science devices can hold working.
Voyager 2, a twin spacecraft, continues to function nicely in interstellar house 12.1 billion miles (19.5 billion kilometers) from Earth. By comparability, Neptune, the farthest planet from Earth, is, at most, solely 2.9 billion miles away. Each probes have been launched in 1977 and have far exceeded their unique goal to fly by planets.
Now, they’ve change into the one two spacecraft to collect information from interstellar house and supply insights concerning the heliosphere, or the bubble created by the solar that extends past the planets in our photo voltaic system.