#NASA #regained #contact #Voyager #spacecraft #traveled
After 5 months without communication, Voyager 1 was able to transmit a correct message to Earth (NASA)
In the immensity of space, in what is unknown to human beings, there is an object created by his own hands that became the furthest that has traveled from Earth.
Victor Ingrassia
This is the Voyager 1 probe, located exactly 24,000 million kilometers away and continues to move further away every second, now traveling outside our Solar System, at about 61,500 kilometers per hour.
Thirty-five years after its launch in 1977, Voyager 1 had made its operators at NASA very nervous, since towards the end of last year it lost communication with our planet. Or rather, they were still in communication, but with messages that were indecipherable and meaningless, the product of a breakdown or failure in their computers.
It was exactly on November 14, 2023, after 11 years of exploration of interstellar space and while at a staggering distance of 24 billion kilometers from Earth, when the spacecraft binary code, a computer language composed of zeros and some that it uses to communicate, stopped making sense for the mission specialists who control it and send it different commands.
Scientists confirmed that the interstellar probe reached 1,000 AU – 1 AU is the distance from the Sun to Earth – in the interstellar medium. That’s about 10 times farther than the Voyager spacecraft. (JOHNS HOPKINS APL)
NASA worked for 5 months to resolve a problem with one of the three computers aboard the aging Voyager 1 interstellar spacecraft, called the flight data system (FDS), that was not communicating properly with one of the probe’s subsystems, called the drive. telecommunications (TMU).
The thing is that, according to experts, the FDS is designed to collect data from scientific instruments, as well as engineering data on the health and condition of the spacecraft. It then combines that information into a single “packet” of data that the TMU sends back to Earth. The data is in the form of ones and zeros, or binary code. Variable combinations of two numbers are the basis of all computer language.
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