NASA spacecraft stops communicating with Earth: Groundhog Day

Engineers are currently trying to solve this problem as the aging spacecraft explores uncharted space territories along the outer limits of the solar system, CNN reports.

Voyager 1 is currently the furthest spacecraft from Earth at about 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers), while its twin Voyager 2 is more than 12 billion miles away from our planet. billion kilometers). Both are in interstellar space and are the only spacecraft ever to operate outside the heliosphere, the sun’s bubble of magnetic fields and particles that extends far beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Originally designed to last for five years, the Voyager probes turned out to be the two longest-running spacecraft in history. Their exceptionally long lifetimes mean both spacecraft have provided additional information about our solar system and beyond since achieving their preliminary goals of flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune decades ago.

But their unexpectedly long journeys were not without difficulties, CNN notes.

Voyager 1 is equipped with three onboard computers, including a flight data system that collects information from the spacecraft’s science instruments and combines it with engineering data reflecting Voyager 1’s current state of performance. Mission control on Earth receives this data in binary code, or a series of ones and zeros.

But Voyager 1’s flight data system now appears to be stuck on auto-replay, in a scenario reminiscent of the movie Groundhog Day.

The mission team first noticed the problem on November 14, when the flight data system’s telecommunications unit began sending back a repeating pattern of ones and zeros, as if it were caught in a loop.

Although the spacecraft can still receive and execute commands transmitted from the mission team, a problem with this telecommunications unit means that no science or engineering data from Voyager 1 is being returned to Earth.

Over the weekend, Voyager’s crew sent commands to the spacecraft to restart its flight data system, but no useful data has yet been received, according to NASA.

NASA engineers are now trying to gather more information about the root cause of the problem before determining the next steps to potentially fix it, said Calla Cofield, a media relations specialist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, who is leading the mission. The process may take weeks.

As Cofield recalls, Voyager 1 last encountered a similar but not identical problem with its flight data system in 1981, and the current problem does not appear to be related to other glitches the spacecraft has experienced in recent years. .

As both Voyager probes undergo new tests, mission team members can only look at the original manuals written decades ago, and they cannot explain the problems the spacecraft face as they age.

The Voyager team wants to consider all possible consequences before sending additional commands to the spacecraft to make sure it doesn’t affect its performance in unexpected ways.

Voyager 1 is so far away that it takes 22.5 hours for commands sent from Earth to reach the spacecraft. Additionally, the team must wait 45 hours to receive a response.

As the aging twin Voyager probes continue to explore space, the team gradually turned off the instruments on these “senior citizens” to save power and prolong their missions, Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd previously told CNN.

Along the way, both spacecraft encountered unexpected problems and failures, including a seven-month period in 2020 when Voyager 2 was unable to contact Earth. In August, the mission team used a long-range “shout” technique to restore communications with Voyager 2 after the team inadvertently pointed the spacecraft’s antenna in the wrong direction.

While the team hopes to restore a regular flow of data sent by Voyager 1, the mission’s main value lies in its duration, Cofield says. For example, scientists want to see how particles and magnetic fields change as the probes move away from the heliosphere. But this data set will be incomplete if Voyager 1 cannot return information as it continues its flight.

The mission team has been creative in recent years with its strategies to increase power supply to both spacecraft to allow their record-breaking missions to continue.

“Voyagers have not completed all of their core missions for longer than any other spacecraft in history,” says Cofield. “So while the engineering team is working hard to preserve them, we also fully expect problems to arise.”