It's Alive! Voyager 1 Has Sent a Message From Interstellar Space

hi it's me this is exactly what NASA's official Voyager account tweeted a few days back to celebrate Voyager 1's comeback finally after 5 months of gibberish NASA has received a message from Interstellar space in a way that makes sense considering everything that has happened in the past 5 months this is nothing short of a Triumph to be celebrated at 15 billion miles away Voyager 1 holds the title of the farthest human-made object in space the spacecraft has been traveling for nearly half a century now however due to a glitch that led to a chain of confusing communication patterns the last 5 months have been very stressful in the spacecraft's history NASA Engineers working on the fix faced two serious challenges first the spacecraft was built more than five decades ago by people who have long since retired so the present team needed to go very deep into the old do documents to see how the probe and its computers worked secondly the technology is highly outdated although several software updates have been carried out in recent decades as a comparison today even the cell phone in your hand can handle more than 100 billion instructions a second on the other hand Voyager computers can process just 8,000 a second but what exactly was the glitch that took so long to fix why didn't the traditional strategy of turning it on and off work finally and most importantly is the issue completely resolved or is there something else that needs to be addressed the Voyager spacecraft just like computers on Earth uses the binary system to communicate with us it employs only two numbers zero and one representing all kinds of information each zero or one is referred to as a bit and a combination of these bits can represent anything from numbers and letters to more complex data like pictures or sounds there are three main computers on board Voyager 1 and it has turned out that the glitch was linked to one of them called the flight data system or fds the fds is responsible for collecting two types of information from the spacecraft data from scientific instruments designed to study the universe and data related to the spacecraft's own health in indicating if all parts are working correctly or not after collecting this information in binary format the fds processes and combines it into a single data package this package is then sent to the second computer the computer command system containing the Telemetry modulation unit or the tmu which transmits this package back to Earth to do so the binary data are first modulated onto a carrier signal for transmission to Earth One once this is done the tmu transmits the waves carrying the data received on Earth via the deep space Network or the DSN the DSN is a collection of large radio antennas strategically placed around the earth such as in California Spain and Australia to ensure continuous communication with different spacecraft as the planet rotates once the binary data are received they are further processed in data centers the binary data are converted into human readable formats like numerical values graphs or images that are further used for analysis and research since the spacecraft was launched it has been sharing information this way but for the last few months instead of sending the usual mix of scientific information and spacecraft Health Data the tmu was sending a strange and repetitive sequence of ones and zeros that didn't make any sense for some reason the FTS wasn't hand handing the information correctly since a piece of incorrect information was reaching the tmu from fds the tmu was transmitting irrational binary messages back to Earth usually when such a problem arises the first solution is to restart the fds by turning it off and back on again this approach often fixes most technological problems here on Earth and even in space for example back in 2010 when voy 2's data showed a similar issue due to a flip in one of the bits the team performed a resetting command for the memory of the FTS which successfully resolved the issue this onoff mechanism even solved a glitch faced by the Hubble Space Telescope a couple of years ago following the same strategy a reset was also performed on the fds this time but that didn't help the problem persisted when the system was turned back on this prompted engineers and scientists to devise more robust Solutions the Voyager team achieved a breakthrough after months of meticulous troubles shooting they finally identified that a faulty chip was the root cause of all their problems but how did they come to know about it in March 2024 the mission team sent a so-called poke command to the fds a poke command is a direct way to modify the value stored at specific memory addresses of a computer this is typically used for performing low-level operations mostly in older computer systems using poke a programmer can directly interact with the system's Hardware by changing values stored in its memory for instance in some old computer systems like the commodor 64 if you wish to alter the text color you could achieve that using the Poke command each color is denoted by a number and the text color is managed by the value stored at a specific memory address by executing a command like poke 646 comma 7 you could change the text color to Yellow here 646 represents the memory address responsible for the text color and seven signifies yellow this command gives programmer's precise control over the system's physical features making it a valuable tool for implementing exact changes to the Hardware's functionality now returning to Voyager 1 the Poke command enabled Engineers to instruct the system to utilize different readout sequences in its software packages in an effort to resolve the problem eventually after the team received a response from the FTS after 22 and 1/2 hours Engineers noticed some unusual readings from one part of the system the reading seemed to be formatted incorrectly after carefully interpreting the confusing signals the engineers obtained a complete readout of the system's memory by comparing this readout with one taken before the problem occurred the Voyager team identified the source of the corruption it was discovered that about 3% of the computer's memory was corrupted one chip responsible for storing a portion of the fds memory including some of the computer's important software code wasn't working and this is why turning the computer on and off was of no help in November 2023 what was the solution now the spacecraft is billions of miles away and there's no way to repair the chip given this the team decided to relocate the affected code to another location in the fds memory however no single location is large enough on the computer to hold the entire code section this prompted the team to devise a plan to divide the problematic code into pieces and store these pieces in different parts of the fds but again it was more than a one-step process to ensure the code pieces still function together they had to modify them and update any references to the their locations in the FTS memory the team initially isolated the code responsible for handling the spacecraft engineering data and relocated it to a new location in the fds memory on April 18th as mentioned earlier it takes about 22.5 hours for a radio signal to travel to Voyager 1 and another 22.5 hours for a signal to return however this time the weight was worth it when the mission team received a response from the spacecraft on April 20th they discovered that their changes were successful for the first time in 5 months they could monitor the spacecraft's health and Status indicating that their fix had been effective the contact with Voyer 1 was never truly lost it was more akin to being on a phone call where you can't hear the other person but now we're finally able to hear it again however this is just the initial step in the coming weeks the team will continue to re relocate and tweak the remaining affected parts of the fds software once these adjustments are made Voyager 1 will soon be ready to start transmitting scientific data again the data sent by Voyager 1 are critical because the probe is now in a part of space where the sun's influence is weak and it's telling us about things like cosmic rays and magnetic fields in a place we've never been able to study directly before however as Voyager 1 travels further away staying in touch get it's more challenging signals take longer to travel and they're much weaker by the time they reach us despite these challenges Voyager 1's Journey continues it's not headed towards any particular star or Planet but in about 40,000 years it will pass relatively close to a star named glea 445 in human terms this is a long time but it's a blink of an eye on the cosmic scale the sad reality is that Voyager one's days of collecting science data are number bird the two voyagers have been exploring the cosmos for nearly half a century their powers projected to run out sometime Beyond 2025 after that they will silently drift through the Milky Way possibly for eternity scientists are hopeful that the spacecraft will continue to send scientific data until the mission's 50th birthday recently the James web Space Telescope measured how fast the universe is expanding the results have confirmed the biggest crisis in cosmology showing that our best model of the universe is broken and that we are missing something if you miss this episode be sure to catch up on the exciting discovery

Channel: The Secrets of the Universe

Views: 481,277

Keywords: Voyager

Id: Z4P60UT8nRs

Length: 10min 42sec (642 seconds)

Published: Mon May 06 2024