Enlarge / A Voyager area probe in a clear room on the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in 1977. (credit score: House Frontiers/Archive Photographs/Getty Photographs)
Engineers have decided why NASA’s Voyager 1 probe has been transmitting gibberish for almost 5 months, elevating hopes of recovering humanity’s most distant spacecraft.
Voyager 1, touring outbound some 15 billion miles (24 billion km) from Earth, began beaming unreadable knowledge right down to floor controllers on November 14. For almost 4 months, NASA knew Voyager 1 was nonetheless alive—it continued to broadcast a gentle sign—however couldn’t decipher something it was saying.
Confirming their speculation, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California confirmed a small portion of corrupted reminiscence precipitated the issue. The defective reminiscence financial institution is positioned in Voyager 1’s Flight Knowledge System (FDS), considered one of three computer systems on the spacecraft. The FDS operates alongside a command-and-control central pc and one other machine overseeing angle management and pointing.
Learn 10 remaining paragraphs | Feedback
