“It’s not every day you can update the firmware on a device manufactured in the 1970s,” they wrote. hackaday“And it is rarely said that it is a device that extends far beyond the boundaries of our solar system.
“But this is exactly what the JPL team responsible for the Voyager 1 and 2 missions are facing, and they are in the process of sending new firmware patches to these amazing feats of engineering.”
From NASA’s announcement:
One effort is addressing fuel residue that appears to be building up in the thin tubes of some of the spacecraft’s thrusters. Thrusters are used to keep each spacecraft’s antenna pointed toward Earth. This type of accumulation has also been observed in a small number of other spacecraft. In some parts of the propellant introduction tube, accumulation is becoming noticeable. To slow that buildup, the mission began by rotating the two spacecraft slightly farther in each direction. [almost 1 degree] before firing the thrusters. This reduces the frequency of thruster firing…as the spacecraft rotates more, some scientific data may be occasionally lost, but the person on the other end will occasionally cut out when making a phone call. The research team concluded that this plan would allow Voyager to return more data over time.
Engineers cannot know exactly when a thruster propellant inlet tube will become completely clogged, but with these precautions they can prevent it from happening for at least another five years, and possibly longer. I don’t expect anything like that to happen. “At this point in the mission, the engineering team was faced with a number of challenges for which we had no strategy,” said Linda Spilker, project scientist for the mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “There is,” he said. “But they continue to come up with creative solutions.”
But that’s not the only problem.
The team is also uploading a software patch to prevent a recurrence of a glitch that occurred on Voyager 1 last year. Engineers resolved the glitch, and the patch is intended to prevent the problem from happening again on Voyager 1 or its twin, Voyager 2.
In 2022, the Voyager 1 spacecraft’s onboard computer that orients it to Earth begins sending back garbled status reports, even though it otherwise continues to operate normally. The Attitude and Articulation Control System (AACS) was incorrectly directing commands and writing them into the computer’s memory. instead of running them. One of his missed commands caused the AACS status report to become garbled before it reached the engineers on the ground.
The team determined that AACS had entered the wrong mode. However, since we were unable to determine the cause, we do not know if the problem will reoccur. A software patch should prevent that.
“This patch is like an insurance policy that protects us in the future and helps us continue exploring for as long as possible,” said Suzanne Dodd, JPL’s Voyager project manager. “These spacecraft are the only ones ever to operate in interstellar space, so the data they send back is uniquely valuable to understanding our local universe. .”
Since their launch in 1977, NASA’s two Voyager spacecraft have traveled more than 12 billion miles (each!) and are still sending back data from beyond our solar system.
