NASA maintains contact with Voyager 1

WASHINGTON (EFE).— NASA revealed that it maintains communication with the Voyager 1 space probe despite the failure of the ship’s computers, which has been transmitting worthless data for days.

The heads of the two Voyager spacecraft, Dr. Linda Spilker and Suzanne Dodd, manager of the Voyager Interstellar Mission, pointed out to questions from the media that the problem with the three computers that make up the flight data system (FDS) “persists.” ”, despite the hard work that engineers have been doing for days.

But Spilker and Dodd confirmed that communication between the ship and the control center on Earth remains open, contrary to information that indicated in recent days that contact had been lost.

“The signal that carries the data continues to be emitted by the ship. It just doesn’t contain any useful data. The team is able to obtain some information from the signal that allows us to know that the ship continues to receive and execute the commands,” explained the two people responsible for the program.

The problem prevents Voyager 1 from sending scientific or flight information to our planet.

Restarting the FDS, the most recent attempt so far to solve it, has not worked, the two scientists confirmed.

The mission of the FDS is to collect the data captured by the probe’s scientific instruments, as well as data on the situation of the ship itself, to send them to the control center on Earth. NASA noted that although the reboot did not resolve the failure, it “has provided new information that helps eliminate some of the possible causes that may be responsible for the problem.”

In this sense, the US space agency is now studying previous difficulties that are similar but not identical to those suffered by Voyager 1 to “learn more about the problem before we can fix it.”

“The team will spend a few more weeks collecting more information from the spacecraft and learning more about FDS and other spacecraft systems to try to get to the bottom of the problem,” NASA concluded.

Voyager 1 was launched in September 1977 and is currently 24 billion kilometers from Earth, so the signal from the control center needs 22.5 hours to reach the ship.

At that distance, NASA engineers require 45 hours to obtain responses from the probe and determine the effectiveness of the commands sent.

Voyager 2, the sister ship of Voyager 1 and which was launched in August 1977, is about 20.2 billion kilometers from Earth.