The process of troubleshooting an issue with Voyager 1 traveling through interstellar space is complicated. It takes about 45 hours for commands to be sent and a response to come back, but NASA engineers recently got a new clue to solving the spacecraft computer issue.
NASA engineers are acting as detectives to resolve a communication issue with the Voyager 1 spacecraft, one of the space agency's 46-year-old twin spacecraft zooming through interstellar space.Voyager 1 and 2 launched in 1977 a few weeks apart, taking advantage of a 176-year planetary alignment to take a grand tour of all four giant outer planets – Neptune, Uranus, Saturn and Jupiter.
" After carefully creating and checking the plan, a command or a "poke" is sent to Voyager in hopes of fixing the corrupted section of the computer. Then, they wait two days to find out if it worked."The waiting in between is hard. That's for sure," Spilker said.On Wednesday, NASA shared hopeful news that the Voyager team saw different activity on one section of the FDS but still not in the correct format.