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Communications Space NASA

NASA Figured Out Why Its Voyager 1 Probe Has Been Glitching for Months (gizmodo.com) 58

Posted by BeauHD from the ones-and-zeroes dept.
NASA engineers have traced the Voyager 1 spacecraft's transmitted gibberish to corrupted memory hardware in its flight data system (FDS). "The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn't working," NASA wrote in an update. Gizmodo reports: FDS collects data from Voyager's science instruments, as well as engineering data about the health of the spacecraft, and combines them into a single package that's transmitted to Earth through one of the probe's subsystems, the telemetry modulation unit (TMU), in binary code. FDS and TMU have been having trouble communicating with one another. As a result, TMU has been sending data to mission control in a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes. NASA's engineers aren't quite sure what corrupted the FDS memory hardware; they think that either the chip was hit by an energetic particle from space or that it's just worn out after operating for 46 years. [...] The engineers are hoping to resolve the issue by finding a way for FDS to operate normally without the corrupted memory hardware, enabling Voyager 1 to begin transmitting data about the cosmos and continue its journey through deep space.
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NASA Figured Out Why Its Voyager 1 Probe Has Been Glitching for Months More

NASA Figured Out Why Its Voyager 1 Probe Has Been Glitching for Months

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  • Those damn Klingons.. (Score:3)

    by backslashdot ( 95548 ) on Saturday April 06, 2024 @05:11AM (#64374298)

    Need to stop using our probes for target practice.

  • A big thumbs up (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Viol8 ( 599362 ) on Saturday April 06, 2024 @05:24AM (#64374310) Homepage

    To whoever built the hardware for this probe. Operating continously for 46 years in hard vacuum is a triumph of reliability.

    • This was the peak of hardware quality -- also including humans. While plenty of other gear made at that time was of poor quality, the very best space probes -- and the very smartest and best looking humans -- were made at that time. If you were not in the womb during Voyager 1&2 launches, you suffer from ongoing enshittification of everything. :p

      • This was the peak of hardware quality -- also including humans.

        Older generation claims that younger people are worse. I'm sure that has never happened before. /s

        • No, no. I'm not claiming that older = better. It's only a specific generation that's the peak. To be exact, assuming no post-term pregnancy, you need to have been born between 1977-09-05 and 1978-05-27. Everyone who's either younger or older is inferior to those from the peak. :) And, judging from the quality of at least one human from that interval, quality of spacecraft hardware is no surprise.

          (And some bits of that hardware start to wear out, dammit.)

        • Re:A big thumbs up (Score:4, Insightful)

          by Roogna ( 9643 ) on Saturday April 06, 2024 @02:02PM (#64375218)

          More I think the generation that built them had management that encouraged reliability. They wanted to prove the quality of the devices they were building. The generation of products now is instead specifically built for the short profit cycle only, and anytime anyone in the current generation of people actually building things is stuck with management that shoots down suggestions of building for reliability if it has any cost to doing so.

          • Re: (Score:2)

            by tlhIngan ( 30335 )

            More I think the generation that built them had management that encouraged reliability. They wanted to prove the quality of the devices they were building. The generation of products now is instead specifically built for the short profit cycle only, and anytime anyone in the current generation of people actually building things is stuck with management that shoots down suggestions of building for reliability if it has any cost to doing so

            I think it's also a sum of no one knew any better so things were overd

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by AmiMoJo ( 196126 )

        We have more reliable hardware now. If it was launching today we could do a redundant system and automatic failover.

        • The Voyagers each have a redundant FDS - unfortunately the one on Voyager 1 failed back in 1981. "When it was developed five decades ago, Voyager's Flight Data Subsystem was an innovation in computing. It was the first computer on a spacecraft to make use of volatile memory. Each Voyager spacecraft launched with two FDS computers, but Voyager 1's backup FDS failed in 1981, according to Dodd." https://www.wired.com/story/na... [wired.com]

    • Re: A big thumbs up (Score:5, Insightful)

      by beelsebob ( 529313 ) on Saturday April 06, 2024 @06:30AM (#64374370)

      A big thumbs up to all the engineers reverse engineering whatâ(TM)s going wrong too. Thereâ(TM)s some really impressive sleuthing going into figuring out how to keep it alive even longer, 43 years after its mission was supposed to end.

      • It's a marvelous achievement and a breath of fresh air among fake news, crypto and ai articles. Congratulations and keep it up!
      • What can I say? The chip only lasted 46 years. They just don't build spacecrafts like they used to. (I agree that it is quite an achievement.)
    • Oh yeah. That thing's almost two years older than me and it's still trucking. Amazing, really!

  • The engineers who designed those probes (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Rosco P. Coltrane ( 209368 ) on Saturday April 06, 2024 @05:25AM (#64374312)

    Need to be celebrated loudly and publicly - those who are still alive.

    The engineers who keep this thing going too.

    The Voyager probes are literally part of my life. I've always known them. For me, they're a fixture of the sky like the Sun and the Moon. They're precious little bits of living humanity far out there. If they die, something inside would die too, and I sure hope I kick the bucket before they do.

    • Re:The engineers who designed those probes (Score:5, Interesting)

      by Miles_O'Toole ( 5152533 ) on Saturday April 06, 2024 @07:29AM (#64374452)

      I was at an American Association for the Advancement of Science conference in Toronto when one of the Voyagers sent back the first pictures of Saturn's braided ring. Watching a bunch of scientists do back-of-napkin math and figure out that there were probably a couple of "shepherding moons" making it happen was one of the best examples of real science in the real world I've ever seen.

      I'm 100% with you. When those little guys die, they'll take a piece of me with them.

    • >I sure hope I kick the bucket before they do.

      While the power and electronics fight to see who fails first, the "carry information out into the galaxy" part of the mission will very likely last the next 5 billion years at least. Someone has done the math and plotted the likely trajectories of the probes over that period, and calculated the amount of damage that is anticipated to be inflicted upon the golden records. They will be OK.

      May you live a long and happy life knowing you're not going to outlast

      • I meant active computing.

        As long as those robots keep thinking with their tiny sixties electronic brains, they're as close to humanity's living children outside of the solar system.

        When they stop thinking, sure, they'll carry data for aeons for someone or something to discover one day maybe, but no differently than a dead body would carry information in a side pocket. It's useful but it's not alive anymore.

        I might very well stop thinking before they do. I'm a few years away from retirement and I smoked for

    • Re: (Score:1)

      by sterni ( 548333 )
      Yes!

  • amazing (Score:3, Insightful)

    by jaygull ( 10381371 ) on Saturday April 06, 2024 @07:28AM (#64374450)
    It's amazing what voyager has done with 69 (nice) kilobytes of total memory, and for 46 years. I have trouble even making a .jpg less than 69K, and here this thing is, exiting the galaxy.

    • >and here this thing is, exiting the galaxy.

      In the remaining lifetime of the galaxy, this is conceivably possible, but I'm fairly confident if it happens, it'll happen as a consequence of our galaxy and Andromeda merging.

      It's not terribly likely Voyager will gain the acceleration required to be ejected from the Milky Way any time before that.

      https://www.space.com/predicti... [space.com]

      • >and here this thing is, exiting the galaxy.

        In the remaining lifetime of the galaxy, this is conceivably possible

        Not really - its velocity is far below the escape velocity of the galaxy.

        • Right... but there remain chances of gravitational interactions that change that. Space is big, stuff is far apart, Voyager moves pretty slowly relatively speaking... but it's not impossible.

          • I'm no expert, but the only gravitational interaction I can think of that would take Voyager out of the Milky Way would be an extragalactic object passing through Voyager.

    • Re:amazing (Score:5, Informative)

      by jd ( 1658 ) <imipakNO@SPAMyahoo.com> on Saturday April 06, 2024 @08:26AM (#64374522) Homepage Journal

      This is also vanilla RAM. Well, rad-hardened to the best of their ability back then, but as far as I can tell, there's oy error-correction in transmissions, not in the RAM itself.

      https://destevez.net/2021/12/v... [destevez.net]

      Error-correcting RAM is used in business on Earth because cosmic rays can corrupt data over the brief lifespans of a business server. Imagine being in deep space with no atmosphere, no magnetosphere, and no heliosphere. The radiation the Voyagers are having to endure is orders of magnitude greater than designed for and for decades longer.

      That a chip has fried is news because it's just one. NASA does amazingly well, but I doubt New Horizons will last as long, and I sincerely doubt any private firm will be capable of building a probe that can Voyager's achievements.

      • > I doubt New Horizons will last as long

        What does New Horizons lack in comparison? NH does have more capacity for software complex enough to have plenty of work-arounds.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by jd ( 1658 )

          It's not what it lacks. It's because it uses newer components. As you make the transistors smaller and reduce the voltages, you increase the damage a cosmic ray strike will do. Yes, the chips are rad-hardened, but anything that gets through will have greater impact and have a greater risk of frying a component versus flipping the bit. The rad hardening will also have improved, but the risks will have increased faster than the protections.

          However, there will undoubtedly be better error-correction in NH at ci

  • BUSTED CAP (Score:3)

    by redelm ( 54142 ) on Saturday April 06, 2024 @07:44AM (#64374484) Homepage

    Most likely a broken (open) capacitor, just like most failed earth-bound electronics. A remarkably common failure-mode, especially in electrolytics (which I doubt anyone is stupid enough to send into space, even NASA).

    • Most likely a broken (open) capacitor, just like most failed earth-bound electronics. A remarkably common failure-mode, especially in electrolytics (which I doubt anyone is stupid enough to send into space, even NASA).

      Are you saying the capacitor is in flux? A flux capacitor?

      • Re: (Score:3)

        by redelm ( 54142 )
        Redundant! All capacitors are in flux or they are not doing their job.

        • Re: (Score:2)

          by kackle ( 910159 )
          Clearly that capacitor is "not fluxing" because Voyager passed 88 mph a long time ago, and would have disappeared into time by now.

          • Clearly that capacitor is "not fluxing" because Voyager passed 88 mph a long time ago, and would have disappeared into time by now.

            Isn’t it already almost a day into the past now?

            • Re: (Score:2)

              by kackle ( 910159 )
              You blew my mind--I'll have to re-watch the movie to learn more... In other words, I have to get "Back to the Future".
    • I'm sure Military grade components were used for Voyager's construction. If most Earth-bound electronics used Military grade capacitors (and were designed better), I bet they would also last 47 years.

      • Not military grade. Space grade. Much higher quality than military grade back then.

        But yes, using higher quality capacitors would fix over half the problems we have with electrical equipment these days.

  • journey paused (Score:5, Insightful)

    by danda ( 11343 ) on Saturday April 06, 2024 @08:11AM (#64374510)

    enabling Voyager 1 to begin transmitting data about the cosmos and continue its journey through deep space

    I have a feeling it's journey will continue whether it is transmitting anything or not...

    • Re: (Score:2)

      by jd ( 1658 )

      That will depend a lot on whether the Klingons and Trisolarons join forces.

    • enabling Voyager 1 to begin transmitting data about the cosmos and continue its journey through deep space

      I have a feeling it's journey will continue whether it is transmitting anything or not...

      Correct. Its current velocity is well above that needed for escape velocity for this solar system but it won't escape the Milky Way without help.

      https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/mission/status/ [nasa.gov]

  • Tricky (Score:3)

    by johnw ( 3725 ) on Saturday April 06, 2024 @09:34AM (#64374668)

    Now they need to find not only a replacement chip of the same type but also a field service engineer willing to go out on a Saturday.

    • You joke, but if you could be put in cryosleep and shot out there to catch up with it and fix it without any hope of return... well, ignoring the fact that would require superior technology and you might as well just send a new probe, I can think of worse ways to expend a human life.

      Everybody dies, but not everyone gets the chance to fix humanity's first interstellar mission before doing so.

      • You joke, but if you could be put in cryosleep and shot out there to catch up with it and fix it without any hope of return

        Currently it takes just over 22 hours [nasa.gov] to send a message to the probe. If you could get a spacecraft to travel at 1/4 the speed of light, you're looking at a few days trip (if my math is correct). That would be like driving across the U.S.

        The bigger problem would be you can't dock with the craft so you'd have to match speed and then figure out how to open the the craft (don't forget yo

  • "I am VGer"....... /s

  • Two possibilities are that the chip could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or that it simply may have worn out after 46 years.

    Does anyone know the probability of a high energy particle (HEP) damaging such chips? In space HEP's can pack a punch. Even within the protection of Earth's magnetosphere, astronauts often report seeing sudden bright sparks or flashes. The theory is that HEP's are breaking up in the eye's liquid chamber or in the brain's image processing sections.

    • I can tell you that at Cisco, customers reported a few random crashes every day that couldn't be explained any other way than cosmic rays.

      We called them "acts of God".

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