NASA found a malfunction on a spacecraft 24 billion km away

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

Over the past five months, the Voyager 1 spacecraft transmitted unreadable data back to Earth. Before that, the 46-year-old ship sent out regular radio signals as it drifted farther and farther away from the Solar System. However, in November 2023, the signal suddenly became distorted, meaning scientists could not read any data from the ship and they did not know where the problem came from.

Voyager 1 is flying in interstellar space. (Photo: NASA).

In March 2024, NASA engineers transmitted a command prompt signal to the spacecraft to retrieve display information from the spacecraft's flight data subsystem (FDS) . It was the system that packaged Voyager 1's scientific and engineering data before transmitting it to Earth. After decoding the ship's response, the engineering team found the source of the problem was in the damaged 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 announced. "Engineers cannot determine with certainty what caused the problem. It is possible that the chip was hit by a high-energy particle from space or was simply outdated after 46 years."

Although it took several months, NASA engineers were able to find a way to run FDS without the burned chip, restoring the spacecraft's signal transmission capabilities, allowing it to continue sending readings from beyond the Solar System. .

Since Voyager 1 launched on September 5, 1977, the spacecraft has flown away from the Sun at a speed of about 17km/sec. Voyager 1 officially flew through interstellar space in 2012, becoming the first spacecraft to do so. Currently, this is the furthest man-made object from Earth.