NASA appears to have solved the mystery that forces Voyager 1 to transmit data.
See also: NASA return to the Moon: Artemis mission begins today
NASA engineers have discovered the error that caused critical instruments on the four-decade-old spacecraft to send "confusing" information to mission controllers on Earth.
Voyager 1's articulation and attitude control system (AACS), which keeps its antenna pointed toward Earth, began sending back information that didn't reflect what was actually happening on the spacecraft earlier this year. AACS appeared to be working normally, but the data it was sending back was deemed invalid because it didn't correspond to any possible state the system could be in .
Also, the rest of the detector appeared healthy, as it continued to collect and return scientific data.
The agency announced today that it had found the source of the confusing information: a “zombie computer” that should not have been used to transmit telemetry data.
See also: NASA's TESS: Exoplanet detected that may have water
While NASA engineers have resolved the problem, they still don't know why AACS started routing information through the non-functional computer. However, they speculate that AACS likely received a faulty command from another onboard computer.
NASA notes that if this other onboard computer produced a “bad command,” there could be a problem somewhere else on the spacecraft. The search is ongoing for what the underlying issue is, but engineers believe it won’t drastically harm its future.
Voyager 1 launched from Cape Canaveral in September 1977 and is now the farthest spacecraft from Earth, traveling through space at a distance of about 14.5 billion miles (23.3 billion kilometers).
See also: James Webb NASA: Jupiter as you've never seen it before!
Voyager 1 was the first man-made object to reach interstellar space, and in 1998 it surpassed Pioneer 10 to become the most distant human-made object.
Information source: zdnet.com
