Traveling billions of kilometers from Earth in interstellar space, the Voyager 1 spacecraft has once again established communication with Earth, albeit on a very weak signal.
NASA successfully re-established communications with the Voyager-1 spacecraft on October 24 after a brief downtime due to fault protection system activation.
The incident began when an order to turn on the heater on October 16 caused Voyager 1 to turn off its primary X-band radio transmitter, switching instead to a backup S-band transmitter, not used since 1981. Was.
“The transmitter shut-off appears to have been caused by the spacecraft's fault protection system, which responds autonomously to onboard issues,” NASA said.
Lightning protection systems are designed to save power by disabling non-essential systems when power supply problems occur.
The team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) faced challenges in detecting the weak S-band signal as it travels more than 25 billion kilometers from Earth.
Transmission typically takes about 46 hours for the signal to travel back and forth to the spacecraft.
Spacecraft usually communicate with Earth using an X-band radio transmitter, which is named for the specific frequency it uses. The flight team correctly guessed that the fault protection system had reduced the rate at which the transmitter was sending back data.
After confirming that the S-band transmitter was operational on October 22, engineers began investigating the root cause of the fault protection activation.
He estimates it could take several days or weeks to identify the underlying problem.
Voyager 1, launched in 1977, continues to provide invaluable data from interstellar space, despite its aging technology and increasing operational challenges.
Voyager 1 uses liquid hydrazine as fuel, which is converted to gas over a short period of time to adjust the spacecraft's orientation. Each day, about 40 of these pulses are needed to stay aligned with the Earth.
In August 2012 the spacecraft officially crossed the boundary called the heliopause, making it the first man-made object to do so. Currently, it is more than 25 billion kilometers away from Earth, traveling through the space between the stars in the Milky Way.