Engineers have mounted a difficulty with the Voyager 1 probe, one of many two most distant artifical objects within the universe. A wierd subject affecting the Voyager 1 spacecraft’s management system was first introduced in May, and although the glitch is now mounted the underlying reason for the problem stays a thriller.

Two Voyager probes named Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 had been launched within the Nineteen Seventies, and have since traveled by way of the photo voltaic system and out into interstellar house, the place they proceed to ship again information. It’s not stunning that the 40-year-old {hardware} is growing points, although the current downside was a puzzling one. Voyager 1’s perspective articulation and management system (AACS), which is accountable for maintaining the probe’s antenna pointed accurately towards Earth, was sending again unusual and inconceivable readings. However, the craft nonetheless gave the impression to be wholesome and persevering with on its journey as anticipated, and was capable of ship information accurately.

Engineers who examined the issue lately introduced that they had discovered what should be blamed for the glitch. The AACS was sending its information through the improper pc, utilizing one which has not been used for a few years as an alternative of the functioning pc. This previous pc was accountable for the garbled information.

To repair the problem, the staff despatched instructions to set the AACS to ship its information through the proper pc, and that corrected the issue. However, they nonetheless aren’t positive what triggered the AACS to modify to the improper pc within the first place, so they’ll preserve working to establish the underlying downside. It might be that there’s a fault in one other of the onboard computer systems which triggered the AACS to make the swap.

“We’re happy to have the telemetry back,” stated Suzanne Dodd, Voyager’s undertaking supervisor, in a assertion. “We’ll do a full memory readout of the AACS and look at everything it’s been doing. That will help us try to diagnose the problem that caused the telemetry issue in the first place. So we’re cautiously optimistic, but we still have more investigating to do.”

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