At 47 years outdated, the pair of Voyager probes are the oldest at the moment operational deep house mission, and of their time they’ve traveled throughout our photo voltaic system and out into the interstellar house that lies past the affect of our solar. At a distance of round 15.4 billion miles away from Earth, and with {hardware} constructed within the Seventies, the pair have confronted their share of technical difficulties.
Voyager 1 particularly had a severe problem with its communications system this 12 months that prevented it from transmitting science information for months. But now, following some very cautious fixes, Voyager 1 is again on-line once more, having resumed its science operations and persevering with its lengthy, lonely mission.
The communication drawback was introduced in December final 12 months, when a system referred to as the telemetry modulation unit stopped speaking with the probe’s laptop system, referred to as the flight information system. That problem was fastened in April this 12 months, by engineers cleverly divvying up the work of a damaged chip and distributing it all through the functioning laptop system. In June, Voyager 1 might energy its science devices again on and return to its observations.
That wasn’t the tip of the probe’s issues although. In October, the spacecraft turned off one in every of its radio transmitters for no apparent purpose, in what appeared to be an computerized response when the spacecraft detects a fault. Non-essential techniques are designed to show themselves off when an anomalous occasions happens to stop harm, reminiscent of from drawing an excessive amount of energy. But this meant that a part of the communications system referred to as the X-band radio transmitter was now not working correctly, and the spacecraft might solely talk utilizing a weaker transmission system referred to as the S-band.
It wasn’t clear if the S-band sign would even be robust sufficient to be picked up from Earth, however engineers have been in a position to find the sign and keep up a correspondence with the spacecraft. This meant they weren’t in a position to get science information although, attributable to communication limitations.
Before they may flip the X-band transmitter again on, engineers had to determine what had triggered the fault detection within the first place. It seems to have been turning on a radiator that triggered the fault, because the spacecraft is working on such a tiny quantity of energy. Though its energy mills output round 470 watts on launch, the spacecraft loses 4 watts of energy annually, so energy is a continuing concern. The spacecraft at the moment makes use of 4 of its 10 authentic science devices.
Engineers reactivated the X-band transmitter earlier this month, and has been accumulating information once more since final week. With a couple of closing duties like resetting a system that synchronizes the spacecraft’s three onboard computer systems, will probably be again to full operations as soon as once more.
