Communication with the craft was disrupted, but Voyager 1 managed to find an unexpected solution on its own.
Voyager 1 continues to impress. Even after 47 years, having entered interstellar space along with its twin, you’d think the spacecraft would have run out of surprises. Not a chance. The probe recently experienced another glitch, causing a brief loss of communication, yet managed to correct it independently using hardware that hadn’t been activated since 1981.
Currently, the probe is more than 24 billion kilometers (15 billion miles) away from Earth, with signals taking over 22.5 hours to travel between them. On October 16, the ground team instructed the spacecraft to activate one of its heaters. Voyager 1, facing extreme cold, requires warmth to keep its systems operational. Though the spacecraft’s radioisotope power source is gradually depleting, it still has enough energy to supply heat.
Credit: Pixabay/CC0 Public Domain
However, something went amiss. By October 18, there was no response. Voyager 1 utilizes an X-band radio transmitter to stay in contact with the Deep Space Network. The mission team, well-versed with the spacecraft’s behavior, deduced that the command might have set off the fault protection system, resulting in reduced data transmission and a signal shift from the X-band transmitter.
The team tracked down the signal and successfully located it. The glitch was minor, without much concern—unlike last year when the spacecraft began transmitting unintelligible data.
With this in mind, the team continued investigating. Then, on October 19, a more troubling issue arose as the signal vanished entirely. Fortunately, Voyager 1’s onboard computer somehow found an unexpected workaround.
“The flight team suspected that Voyager 1’s fault protection system was triggered twice more and that it turned off the X-band transmitter and switched to a second radio transmitter called the S-band,” NASA’s Tony Greicius writes in the Voyager Blog.
“While the S-band uses less power, Voyager 1 had not used it to communicate with Earth since 1981. It operates at a different frequency from the X-band transmitter, making the signal significantly weaker. The flight team wasn’t sure if Earth could detect the S-band signal at such a vast distance, but engineers at the Deep Space Network managed to find it.”
The team has confirmed that the S-band transmitter is functioning well, even after all these years and at such an incredible distance. They are currently working to restore the spacecraft’s normal operations.
The Voyager probes continue to exemplify the skill of the engineering team who built them and those who maintain them. Their endurance is nothing short of extraordinary.
