NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has recently started sending back usable engineering data after a malfunctioning memory chip was fixed by engineers. The spacecraft had been producing nonsensical data since 2023, until engineers found the issue to be a damaged chip that stored part of the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS) memory.
The failure of the chip made data from the probe inaccessible and presented a challenge for engineers to troubleshoot. The affected chip contained crucial code for the FDS computer, and relocating the code to another single location was not feasible due to size limitations. Engineers had to come up with an innovative solution that involved breaking the code into segments, adjusting them to work together, and moving them to different areas within the FDS. Any references to the code’s new locations also had to be updated.
Currently more than 15 billion miles away from Earth, Voyager 1 has a significant communication delay of around 22.5 hours for signals to travel from Earth to the spacecraft and back. Engineers successfully moved the code related to packaging engineering data to a new location on April 18, and by April 20, they confirmed that the fix worked, allowing engineering data to be transmitted from the spacecraft once again.
Over the upcoming weeks, the team plans to relocate the remaining impacted software, which will facilitate
