SoylentNews is people
SoylentNews
Voyager 1 Ghosts NASA, Forcing Use of Backup Radio Dormant Since 1981:
Voyager 1 can't seem to catch a break. The interstellar traveler recently recovered from a thruster glitch that nearly ended its mission, and now NASA's aging probe stopped sending data to ground control due to an unknown issue.
On Monday, NASA revealed that Voyager 1 recently experienced a brief pause in communication after turning off one of its radio transmitters. The space agency is now relying on a second radio transmitter that hasn't been used since 1981 to communicate with Voyager 1 until engineers can figure out the underlying issue behind the glitch.
The flight team behind the mission first realized something was amiss with Voyager 1's communication when the spacecraft failed to respond to a command. On October 16, the team used NASA's Deep Space Network (DSN)—a global array of giant radio antennas—to beam instructions to Voyager 1, directing it to turn on one of its heaters.
Voyager 1 should've sent back engineering data for the team to determine how the spacecraft responded to the command. This process normally takes a couple of days, as the command takes about 23 hours to travel more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) to the spacecraft and another 23 hours for the flight team to receive a signal back. Instead, the command seems to have triggered the spacecraft's fault protection system, which autonomously responds to onboard issues affecting the mission.
The spacecraft's fault protection system lowered the rate at which its radio transmitter was sending back data to use less power, according to NASA. However, while conserving the spacecraft's power, this mode also changes the X-band radio signal, a frequency range within the electromagnetic spectrum that the DSN's antennas listen for.
The flight team was able to locate the signal a day later but then, on October 19, communication with Voyager 1 stopped entirely. Voyager 1's fault protection system appeared to have been triggered twice more, and it turned off the X-band transmitter altogether. The spacecraft switched to a second radio transmitter called the S-band, which uses less power but transmits a significantly fainter signal. Voyager 1's S-band transmitter hadn't been used since 1981, and the flight team was not sure its signal could be detected due to the spacecraft being much farther away today than it was 43 years ago.
Still, the team of engineers didn't want to risk sending another signal to the X-band transmitter, and decided to give it a shot. On October 22, the team sent a command to confirm whether the S-band transmitter is working and was finally able to reconnect with Voyager 1 two days later. NASA engineers are currently working to determine what may have triggered the spacecraft's fault protection system in its attempt to resolve the issue.
Voyager 1 launched in 1977, less than a month after its twin probe, Voyager 2, began its journey to space. The spacecraft took a faster route, exiting the asteroid belt earlier than its twin and making close encounters with Jupiter and Saturn. Along the way, it discovered two Jovian moons, Thebe and Metis, as well as five new moons and a new ring called the G-ring around Saturn. Voyager 1 ventured into interstellar space in August 2012, becoming the first spacecraft to cross the boundary of our solar system.
The spacecraft has been flying for 47 years, and all that time in deep space has taken a toll on the interstellar probe. NASA engineers have had to come up with creative ways to keep the iconic mission alive. The team recently switched to a different set of thrusters than the one the spacecraft had been relying on, which became clogged with silicon dioxide over the years, using a delicate procedure to preserve Voyager 1's power. Earlier this year, the team of engineers also fixed a communication glitch that had been causing Voyager 1 to transmit gibberish to ground control.
Voyager 1 is no spring chicken, and its upkeep has not been an easy task over the years, especially from billions of miles away. But all-in-all, humanity's long-standing interstellar probe is well worth the effort.
(Score: 2, Funny) by fraxinus-tree on Thursday October 31, @07:41AM (1 child)
... and there is no much left to turn off in order to save power.
(Score: 5, Interesting) by VLM on Thursday October 31, @01:34PM
My limited understanding is they have enough watts to keep the core instruments running until they're out of radio range in a decade or so.
If you click around NSSDC the navigation is a bit rough and leads to GSFC for some instruments and you'll find URLs like this:
https://spdf.gsfc.nasa.gov/pub/data/voyager/voyager1/magnetic_fields/VIM_48s_mag_ascii/V1_MAG-48s_2023_001-271.dat [nasa.gov]
Which are text telemetry measurements. This file is the magnetometer data from the first 3/4 of last year.
I used to be kind of into this, its fun to write code to import a large text into a MySQL db or similar then do "data science" stuff on it. So you could graph the total magnetic field strength (the "F1") and do stuff like Fourier transforms on it or look for solar storms or whatever. I never had much luck but its more fun than made up learning project because you're using real data from an interesting experiment.
For example the sun rotates "about once a month" but it varies by about ten days from pole to equator so you can measure the latitude of a "thing" but measuring its rotation rate on the sun. So if you do a high-res Fourier on various solar measurements around a month, you'll see "stuff" rotate by and the exact time tells you the solar latitude of the "Active stuff" rotating by, more or less. IIRC the formula to convert rotation rate to solar latitude was so ugly a lookup table and estimates worked better. Anyway the point of this rant is it would be amusing to Fourier transform he F1 column over various times ranging from 25-35 days (the DOY column is in days) and see if there are any spikes in the data.
If I could detect solar storms in the relatively high res data I could correlate with closer to earth measurements and knowing the distances and positions the delay would tell you quite a bit. Also the relative phase of a solar disturbance vs the measurements at the two "longitudes" of the earth and the probe would be interesting.
Obviously the planetary visit data is more interesting.
Also in the "modern era" they distribute text files of data (not new enough for XML JSON or YAML, I guess) but its an adventure, in ye olden days the Voyager Jupiter data is all on IBM/360 tape dumps, so you get the adventure of figuring out EBCDIC or IBM's floating point or whatever (its been some years I don't remember how well or poorly that adventure went).
Anyway in summary if you want to learn that new fangled "data science" or what we called in the old days "Fing around with computers" then NASA has a lot of cool data available to the public if you can get past the journalist filler material.