NASA Technicians Are Fixing Troubled Voyager 1 Computers
JAKARTA – The United States Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) said that one of the three computers of Voyager 1, the unmanned spacecraft, was experiencing problems with the Flight Data System (FDS).
The Voyager computer should have been able to receive and carry out commands from Earth, but the opposite happened. The FDS was unable to communicate with the probe subsystem called the telecommunications unit (TMU).
Initially, the TMU transmitted a repetitive pattern of ones and zeros to Voyager, but they did not get feedback from the craft. From the results of this delivery, TMU suspected that FDS was the source of the problem.
NASA said that TMU was still trying to send patterns until last week, the results were still the same. The FDS still receives data sent by the TMU, but the device does not send back processed data.
Currently, technicians are working to repair the FDS. However, the process can be quite long because they have to find a solution with in-depth investigation. Technicians had to open decades-old original documents related to the Voyager system.
Apart from the challenges in investigating the problem, testing the FDS also takes a very long time. Every time the TMU sends a command, Voyager will receive the data 22.5 hours later because of the distance of 24 billion kilometers.
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The data sent back by Voyager also takes the same time. Therefore, the technicians had to wait 45 hours just to get a response. In fact, this response is very important to know whether Voyager is capable of receiving commands.
For information, Voyager 1 is a plane used by NASA to explore the solar system. This plane has been launched since 1977 and is currently in interstellar space, precisely outside the heliopause region.
The Voyager 1 mission is different from its twin, namely Voyager 2. This aircraft must observe uncharted areas and help scientists understand the nature of energy and radiation in space. The hope is that Voyager 1's findings can protect the astronauts' mission.