Engineers Investigating NASA’s Voyager 1 Telemetry Data
The workforce will proceed to check the sign closely as they go on to decide irrespective of whether the invalid data is coming immediately from the AACS or a different method concerned in producing and sending telemetry facts. Until eventually the character of the situation is superior comprehended, the crew can not foresee no matter whether this may affect how extensive the spacecraft can obtain and transmit science data.
Voyager 1 is at this time 14.5 billion miles (23.3 billion kilometers) from Earth, and it normally takes light-weight 20 hours and 33 minutes to vacation that change. That implies it can take approximately two days to mail a concept to Voyager 1 and get a reaction – a delay the mission team is perfectly accustomed to.
“A thriller like this is kind of par for the program at this stage of the Voyager mission,” stated Suzanne Dodd, venture supervisor for Voyager 1 and 2 at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “The spacecraft are equally almost 45 yrs old, which is considerably beyond what the mission planners expected. We’re also in interstellar area – a superior-radiation environment that no spacecraft have flown in in advance of. So there are some huge challenges for the engineering team. But I consider if there’s a way to remedy this challenge with the AACS, our staff will locate it.”
It is probable the staff may perhaps not discover the resource of the anomaly and will in its place adapt to it, Dodd claimed. If they do locate the resource, they might be capable to remedy the difficulty by way of computer software changes or perhaps by working with one particular of the spacecraft’s redundant hardware units.
It wouldn’t be the to start with time the Voyager staff has relied on backup hardware: In 2017, Voyager 1’s most important thrusters showed indicators of degradation, so engineers switched to a further established of thrusters that experienced initially been employed all through the spacecraft’s planetary encounters. People thrusters labored, regardless of possessing been unused for 37 yrs.
Voyager 1’s twin, Voyager 2 (at this time 12.1 billion miles, or 19.5 billion kilometers, from Earth), proceeds to function ordinarily.
Introduced in 1977, both equally Voyagers have operated significantly for a longer time than mission planners envisioned, and are the only spacecraft to gather information in interstellar place. The data they present from this area has helped generate a deeper understanding of the heliosphere, the diffuse barrier the Solar makes about the planets in our photo voltaic program.
Each spacecraft provides about 4 much less watts of electrical power a calendar year, restricting the amount of devices the craft can run. The mission engineering staff has switched off numerous subsystems and heaters in buy to reserve electricity for science devices and essential techniques. No science instruments have been turned off however as a consequence of the diminishing power, and the Voyager team is working to retain the two spacecraft working and returning one of a kind science beyond 2025.
Though the engineers proceed to work at fixing the mystery that Voyager 1 has introduced them, the mission’s experts will continue to make the most of the data coming down from the spacecraft’s special vantage point.
More About the Mission
The Voyager spacecraft were being developed by JPL, which continues to work both of those. JPL is a division of Caltech in Pasadena. The Voyager missions are a element of the NASA Heliophysics Technique Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington.
For a lot more info about the Voyager spacecraft, check out: