NASA finds glitch on spacecraft 24 billion kilometers away

Voyager 1 has been transmitting meaningless data since late November last year because a chip on the spacecraft may have been hit by a high-energy particle.

Voyager 1 is flying in interstellar space. Photo: NASA

For the past five months, the Voyager 1 spacecraft has been transmitting unreadable data back to Earth. Before that, the 46-year-old spacecraft had been sending regular radio signals as it drifted farther and farther from the solar system. But in November 2023, the signals suddenly went haywire, meaning scientists couldn’t read any of the spacecraft’s data and didn’t know where the glitch was coming from.

In March 2024, NASA engineers transmitted a command signal to the spacecraft to retrieve information displayed by the spacecraft's Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), which packages Voyager 1's scientific and technical data before transmitting it back to Earth. After decoding the spacecraft's response, the team of engineers found the source of the problem was a corrupted FDS memory, Live Science reported on April 5.

"The engineering team suspects that the chip responsible for storing part of the FDS's memory is not working," NASA said in a statement. "Engineers cannot determine for sure what caused the problem. It is possible that the chip was hit by a high-energy particle from space or simply has worn out after 46 years."

Although it took several months, NASA engineers were able to figure out how to run the FDS without the burned-out chip, restoring the spacecraft's ability to transmit signals, allowing it to continue sending readings from beyond the solar system.

Since Voyager 1 launched on September 5, 1977, the spacecraft has been traveling away from the Sun at a speed of about 17 kilometers per second. Voyager 1 officially crossed into interstellar space in 2012, becoming the first spacecraft to do so. It is currently the farthest man-made object from Earth.

An Khang (According to Live Science )

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