Aging Voyager 1 Sends Back Response After 'Poke' Signal From Earth

'Engineers have sent a 'poke' to the Voyager 1 probe,' reports CNN, 'and received a potentially encouraging response...'
'A new signal recently received from the spacecraft suggests that the NASA mission team may be making progress in its quest to understand what Voyager 1 is experiencing...'

[T]hey hope to fix a communication issue with the aging spacecraft that has persisted for five months. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, are venturing through uncharted cosmic territory along the outer reaches of the solar system. While Voyager 1 has continued to relay a steady radio signal to its mission control team on Earth, that signal has not carried any usable data since November, which has pointed to an issue with one of the spacecraft's three onboard computers...

On March 3, the team noticed that activity from one part of the flight data system stood out from the rest of the garbled data. While the signal wasn't in the format the Voyager team is used to when the flight data system is functioning as expected, an engineer with NASA's Deep Space Network was able to decode it... The decoded signal included a readout of the entire flight data system's memory, according to an update NASA shared.

'The (flight data system) memory includes its code, or instructions for what to do, as well as variables, or values used in the code that can change based on commands or the spacecraft's status,' according to a NASA blog post. 'It also contains science or engineering data for downlink. The team will compare this readout to the one that came down before the issue arose and look for discrepancies in the code and the variables to potentially find the source of the ongoing issue.'
'The source of the issue appears to be with one of three onboard computers, the flight data subsystem (FDS), which is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it's sent to Earth,' according to NASA's statement.

CNN reminds readers that Voyager 1 'is currently the farthest spacecraft from Earth at about 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away.' Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are now in interstellar space.

Thanks to Slashdot reader Thelasko for sharing the news.

Read more of this story at Slashdot.