Launched in September of 1977, Voyager 1 was sent into space by NASA to explore the unknown universe outside of the sun we were familiar with. The craft also carries the infamous golden disk, containing numerous images and sounds to encapsulate human existence in case of interstellar contact with other beings. At 46 years old, it is currently 15 billion miles away from us. However, over the years, it has experienced numerous glitches and “quirks” with its systems, leading to a repeating, undecipherable code being sent.
All through November to April, Voyager 1’s flight data system has been able to communicate a steady radio signal back to NASA engineers, but hasn’t been able to send any “usable data”.
During the month of March, the team investigated the root cause of the system’s glitches, first by breaking down its code. By sending a command called “poke”, they were able to discover a part of the flight data system that did not appear to align with other codes in the same system. After decoding the “garbled” data, the team was able to receive a readout of the system’s entire memory, discovering that 3% of the memory was corrupted. The chip that stores the memory wasn’t working properly, and although the reason why is unknown the team suspects this was due to the chip either wearing out or “hit by an energetic particle from space.”
Then on April 20th, the team finally received a message about the health and status of the probe’s engineering systems; according to CNN, “everything they’ve seen so far suggests Voyager 1 is healthy and operating properly.”
