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Nasa’s voyager team focuses on software patch, thrusters.

• Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Thruster Buildup

Patching things up, more about the mission, news media contact.

The efforts should help extend the lifetimes of the agency’s interstellar explorers.

Engineers for NASA’s Voyager mission are taking steps to help make sure both spacecraft, launched in 1977, continue to explore interstellar space for years to come.

One effort addresses fuel residue that seems to be accumulating inside narrow tubes in some of the thrusters on the spacecraft. The thrusters are used to keep each spacecraft’s antenna pointed at Earth. This type of buildup has been observed in a handful of other spacecraft.

The team is also uploading a software patch to prevent the recurrence of a glitch that arose on Voyager 1 last year. Engineers resolved the glitch , and the patch is intended to prevent the issue from occurring again in Voyager 1 or arising in its twin, Voyager 2.

The thrusters on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are primarily used to keep the spacecraft antennas pointed at Earth in order to communicate. Spacecraft can rotate in three directions – up and down, to the left and right, and around the central axis, like a wheel. As they do this, the thrusters automatically fire and reorient the spacecraft to keep their antennas pointed at Earth.

Propellant flows to the thrusters via fuel lines and then passes through smaller lines inside the thrusters called propellant inlet tubes that are 25 times narrower than the external fuel lines. Each thruster firing adds tiny amounts of propellant residue, leading to gradual buildup of material over decades. In some of the propellant inlet tubes, the buildup is becoming significant. To slow that buildup, the mission has begun letting the two spacecraft rotate slightly farther in each direction before firing the thrusters. This will reduce the frequency of thruster firings.

The adjustments to the thruster rotation range were made by commands sent in September and October, and they allow the spacecraft to move almost 1 degree farther in each direction than in the past. The mission is also performing fewer, longer firings, which will further reduce the total number of firings done on each spacecraft.

The adjustments have been carefully devised to ensure minimal impact on the mission. While more rotating by the spacecraft could mean bits of science data are occasionally lost – akin to being on a phone call where the person on the other end cuts out occasionally – the team concluded the plan will enable the Voyagers to return more data over time.

Engineers can’t know for sure when the thruster propellant inlet tubes will become completely clogged, but they expect that with these precautions, that won’t happen for at least five more years, possibly much longer. The team can take additional steps in the coming years to extend the lifetime of the thrusters even more.

“This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don’t have a playbook,” said Linda Spilker, project scientist for the mission as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “But they continue to come up with creative solutions.”

In 2022, the onboard computer that orients the Voyager 1 spacecraft with Earth began to send back garbled status reports, despite otherwise continuing to operate normally. It took mission engineers months to pinpoint the issue . The attitude articulation and control system (AACS) was misdirecting commands, writing them into the computer memory instead of carrying them out. One of those missed commands wound up garbling the AACS status report before it could reach engineers on the ground.

The team determined the AACS had entered into an incorrect mode; however, they couldn’t determine the cause and thus aren’t sure if the issue could arise again. The software patch should prevent that.

“This patch is like an insurance policy that will protect us in the future and help us keep these probes going as long as possible,” said JPL’s Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager. “These are the only spacecraft to ever operate in interstellar space, so the data they’re sending back is uniquely valuable to our understanding of our local universe.”

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have traveled more than 15 billion and 12 billion miles from Earth, respectively. At those distances, the patch instructions will take over 18 hours to travel to the spacecraft. Because of the spacecraft’s age and the communication lag time, there’s some risk the patch could overwrite essential code or have other unintended effects on the spacecraft. To reduce those risks, the team has spent months writing, reviewing, and checking the code. As an added safety precaution, Voyager 2 will receive the patch first and serve as a testbed for its twin. Voyager 1 is farther from Earth than any other spacecraft, making its data more valuable.

The team will upload the patch and do a readout of the AACS memory to make sure it’s in the right place on Friday, Oct. 20. If no immediate issues arise, the team will issue a command on Saturday, Oct. 28, to see if the patch is operating as it should.

The Voyager mission was originally scheduled to last only four years, sending both probes past Saturn and Jupiter. NASA extended the mission so that Voyager 2 could visit Uranus and Neptune; it is still the only spacecraft ever to have encountered the ice giants. In 1990, NASA extended the mission again, this time with the goal of sending the probes outside the heliosphere, a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun. Voyager 1 reached the boundary in 2012, while Voyager 2 (traveling slower and in a different direction than its twin) reached it in 2018.

A division of Caltech in Pasadena, JPL built and operates the Voyager spacecraft. The Voyager missions are a part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about the Voyager spacecraft, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/voyager

Calla Cofield Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 626-808-2469 [email protected]

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• Voyager Program

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NASA’s Voyager Team Focuses on Software Patch, Thrusters

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is depicted in this artist’s concept traveling through interstellar space, or the space between stars, which it entered in 2012. Traveling on a different trajectory, its twin, Voyager 2, entered interstellar space in 2018.

The efforts should help extend the lifetimes of the agency’s interstellar explorers.

Engineers for NASA’s Voyager mission are taking steps to help make sure both spacecraft, launched in 1977, continue to explore interstellar space for years to come.

One effort addresses fuel residue that seems to be accumulating inside narrow tubes in some of the thrusters on the spacecraft. The thrusters are used to keep each spacecraft’s antenna pointed at Earth. This type of buildup has been observed in a handful of other spacecraft.

The team is also uploading a software patch to prevent the recurrence of a glitch that arose on Voyager 1 last year. Engineers resolved the glitch , and the patch is intended to prevent the issue from occurring again in Voyager 1 or arising in its twin, Voyager 2.

Thruster Buildup

The thrusters on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are primarily used to keep the spacecraft antennas pointed at Earth in order to communicate. Spacecraft can rotate in three directions – up and down, to the left and right, and around the central axis, like a wheel. As they do this, the thrusters automatically fire and reorient the spacecraft to keep their antennas pointed at Earth.

Propellant flows to the thrusters via fuel lines and then passes through smaller lines inside the thrusters called propellant inlet tubes that are 25 times narrower than the external fuel lines. Each thruster firing adds tiny amounts of propellant residue, leading to gradual buildup of material over decades. In some of the propellant inlet tubes, the buildup is becoming significant. To slow that buildup, the mission has begun letting the two spacecraft rotate slightly farther in each direction before firing the thrusters. This will reduce the frequency of thruster firings.

The adjustments to the thruster rotation range were made by commands sent in September and October, and they allow the spacecraft to move almost 1 degree farther in each direction than in the past. The mission is also performing fewer, longer firings, which will further reduce the total number of firings done on each spacecraft.

The adjustments have been carefully devised to ensure minimal impact on the mission. While more rotating by the spacecraft could mean bits of science data are occasionally lost – akin to being on a phone call where the person on the other end cuts out occasionally – the team concluded the plan will enable the Voyagers to return more data over time.

Get the Latest JPL News

Engineers can’t know for sure when the thruster propellant inlet tubes will become completely clogged, but they expect that with these precautions, that won’t happen for at least five more years, possibly much longer. The team can take additional steps in the coming years to extend the lifetime of the thrusters even more.

“This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don’t have a playbook,” said Linda Spilker, project scientist for the mission as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “But they continue to come up with creative solutions.”

Patching Things Up

In 2022, the onboard computer that orients the Voyager 1 spacecraft with Earth began to send back garbled status reports, despite otherwise continuing to operate normally. It took mission engineers months to pinpoint the issue . The attitude articulation and control system (AACS) was misdirecting commands, writing them into the computer memory instead of carrying them out. One of those missed commands wound up garbling the AACS status report before it could reach engineers on the ground.

The team determined the AACS had entered into an incorrect mode; however, they couldn’t determine the cause and thus aren’t sure if the issue could arise again. The software patch should prevent that.

“This patch is like an insurance policy that will protect us in the future and help us keep these probes going as long as possible,” said JPL’s Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager. “These are the only spacecraft to ever operate in interstellar space, so the data they’re sending back is uniquely valuable to our understanding of our local universe.”

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have traveled more than 15 billion and 12 billion miles from Earth, respectively. At those distances, the patch instructions will take over 18 hours to travel to the spacecraft. Because of the spacecraft’s age and the communication lag time, there’s some risk the patch could overwrite essential code or have other unintended effects on the spacecraft. To reduce those risks, the team has spent months writing, reviewing, and checking the code. As an added safety precaution, Voyager 2 will receive the patch first and serve as a testbed for its twin. Voyager 1 is farther from Earth than any other spacecraft, making its data more valuable.

The team will upload the patch and do a readout of the AACS memory to make sure it’s in the right place on Friday, Oct. 20. If no immediate issues arise, the team will issue a command on Saturday, Oct. 28, to see if the patch is operating as it should.

More About the Mission

The Voyager mission was originally scheduled to last only four years, sending both probes past Saturn and Jupiter. NASA extended the mission so that Voyager 2 could visit Uranus and Neptune; it is still the only spacecraft ever to have encountered the ice giants. In 1990, NASA extended the mission again, this time with the goal of sending the probes outside the heliosphere, a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun. Voyager 1 reached the boundary in 2012, while Voyager 2 (traveling slower and in a different direction than its twin) reached it in 2018.

A division of Caltech in Pasadena, JPL built and operates the Voyager spacecraft. The Voyager missions are a part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about the Voyager spacecraft, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/voyager

News Media Contact

Calla Cofield

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

626-808-2469

[email protected]

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Anti-aging —

Nasa wants the voyagers to age gracefully, so it’s time for a software patch, around a half-dozen full-timers and a few part-timers are keeping voyager alive..

Stephen Clark - Oct 24, 2023 12:15 am UTC

Forty-six years in deep space have taken their toll on NASA's twin Voyager spacecraft. Their antiquated computers sometimes do puzzling things, their thrusters are wearing out, and their fuel lines are becoming clogged. Around half of their science instruments no longer return data, and their power levels are declining.

Still, the lean team of engineers and scientists working on the Voyager program at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory are taking steps to eke out every bit of life from the only two spacecraft flying in interstellar space, the vast volume of dilute gas outside the influence of the Sun's solar wind.

"These are measures that we're trying to take to extend the life of the mission," said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at JPL, in an interview with Ars.

Voyager's instruments are studying cosmic rays, the magnetic field, and the plasma environment in interstellar space. They're not taking pictures anymore. Both probes have traveled beyond the heliopause, where the flow of particles emanating from the Sun runs into the interstellar medium.

"These two spacecraft are still operating, still returning uniquely valuable science data, and every extra day we get data back is a blessing," Dodd said.

While spacecraft engineers love redundancy, they no longer have the luxury of backups on the Voyagers. That means, in any particular section of the spacecraft, a failure of a single part could bring the mission to a halt.

"Everything on both spacecraft is single-string," Dodd said. "There are not any backup capabilities left. In some cases, we powered off stuff to save power, just to keep the instruments on."

Problem-solving from more than 12 billion miles away

Over the weekend, ground controllers at JPL planned to uplink a software patch to Voyager 2. It's a test before the ground team sends the same patch to Voyager 1 to resolve a problem with one of its onboard computers. This problem first cropped up in 2022, when engineers noticed the computer responsible for orienting the Voyager 1 spacecraft was sending down garbled status reports despite otherwise operating normally. It turns out the computer somehow entered an incorrect mode, according to NASA .

Managers wanted to try the patch on Voyager 2 before transmitting it to Voyager 1, which is flying farther from Earth, deeper into interstellar space. That makes observations of the environment around Voyager 1 more valuable to scientists.

At the same time, engineers have devised a new way to operate the thrusters on both Voyager spacecraft. These small rocket engines—fired autonomously—are necessary to keep the main antenna on each probe pointed at Earth. There's a buildup of propellant residue in the narrow lines that feed hydrazine fuel to the thrusters. NASA says the buildup is "becoming significant" in some of the lines, so engineers beamed up fresh commands to the spacecraft in the last few weeks to allow the probes to rotate slightly further in each direction before firing the thrusters.

This will result in the spacecraft performing fewer, longer firings, each of which adds to the residue in the fuel lines. The downside of this change is that science data transmitted back to Earth could occasionally be lost, but over time, the ground team concluded the plan would allow the Voyagers to return more data, NASA said.

With these steps, engineers expect the propellant inlet tubes won't become completely blocked for at least five more years, and "possibly much longer," NASA said. There are other things engineers could try to further extend the lifetime of the thrusters.

“This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don’t have a playbook,” said Linda Spilker, Voyager project scientist at JPL, in a statement. “But they continue to come up with creative solutions.”

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Voyager probes get virtual tune-up to keep decades-long missions going and going

By Andrew Paul

Posted on Oct 23, 2023 2:00 PM EDT

3 minute read

Against all odds and expectations , both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are still going strong after nearly half a century of hurtling through—and far past—the solar system. To help boost the potential for the probes’ continued operations, engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory have beamed out two software updates across the billions of miles separating them from the historic spacecraft. If successful, the pair of interstellar travelers could gain at least another five years’ worth of life, if not more.

On October 20, NASA announced plans to transmit a software patch to protect Voyager 1 and 2 against a glitch that occurred within the former’s system last year. In May 2022, NASA started noticing inaccurate readings coming from Voyager 1’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS). A few months later, engineers determined the AACS was accidentally writing commands into memory instead of actually performing them.

Although engineers successfully resolved an original data issue within Voyager 1 in 2022, the new patch will hopefully ensure such a problem won’t arise again in either probe. Receiving the patch will take over 18 hours to reach transmitters; Voyager 2 will get the patch first to serve as a “testbed for its twin” in case of unintended consequences like accidentally overwriting essential code. Given Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are respectively 15 billion and 12 billion miles from Earth, engineers consider the farther craft’s data more valuable, as it still remains the farthest traveling human-made object. The NASA-JPL team will issue a command on October 28 to test the patch’s efficacy.

[Related: The secret to Voyagers’ spectacular space odyssey .]

The second planned tune-up for Voyager 1 and 2 involves the small thrusters responsible for controlling the probes’ communication antennas. According to NASA, spacecraft can generally rotate in three directions—left and right, up and down, as well as wheellike around a central axis. During these movements, propellant automatically flows through incredibly narrow “inlet tubes” to maintain the antennas’ contact with Earth.

But each time the propellant is used, miniscule residue can stick within the inlet tubings—while not much at first, that buildup is becoming problematic after the Voyager probes’ (many) decades’ of life. To slow the speed of buildup, engineers have edited the probes’ operational commands to allow both craft the ability to rotate nearly 1 degree farther in each available direction. This will reduce how often their thrusters need to fire. When engineers do need to enable thrusters, they now plan to fire them for longer periods of time, thus reducing the overall number of usages. 

[Related: How is Voyager’s vintage technology still flying? ]

“This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don’t have a playbook,” Linda Spilker, Voyager mission project scientist, said via NASA’s update . “But they continue to come up with creative solutions.”

Experts estimate both the fuel lines and software adjustments could extend the Voyager program’s lifespan by another five years. According to NASA, however, “additional steps in the coming years to extend the lifetime of the thrusters even more.”

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Inside NASA's 5-month fight to save the Voyager 1 mission in interstellar space

After working for five months to re-establish communication with the farthest-flung human-made object in existence, NASA announced this week that the Voyager 1 probe had finally phoned home.

For the engineers and scientists who work on NASA’s longest-operating mission in space, it was a moment of joy and intense relief.

“That Saturday morning, we all came in, we’re sitting around boxes of doughnuts and waiting for the data to come back from Voyager,” said Linda Spilker, the project scientist for the Voyager 1 mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “We knew exactly what time it was going to happen, and it got really quiet and everybody just sat there and they’re looking at the screen.”

When at long last the spacecraft returned the agency’s call, Spilker said the room erupted in celebration.

“There were cheers, people raising their hands,” she said. “And a sense of relief, too — that OK, after all this hard work and going from barely being able to have a signal coming from Voyager to being in communication again, that was a tremendous relief and a great feeling.”

The problem with Voyager 1 was first detected in November . At the time, NASA said it was still in contact with the spacecraft and could see that it was receiving signals from Earth. But what was being relayed back to mission controllers — including science data and information about the health of the probe and its various systems — was garbled and unreadable.

That kicked off a monthslong push to identify what had gone wrong and try to save the Voyager 1 mission.

Spilker said she and her colleagues stayed hopeful and optimistic, but the team faced enormous challenges. For one, engineers were trying to troubleshoot a spacecraft traveling in interstellar space , more than 15 billion miles away — the ultimate long-distance call.

“With Voyager 1, it takes 22 1/2 hours to get the signal up and 22 1/2 hours to get the signal back, so we’d get the commands ready, send them up, and then like two days later, you’d get the answer if it had worked or not,” Spilker said.

The team eventually determined that the issue stemmed from one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers. Spilker said a hardware failure, perhaps as a result of age or because it was hit by radiation, likely messed up a small section of code in the memory of the computer. The glitch meant Voyager 1 was unable to send coherent updates about its health and science observations.

NASA engineers determined that they would not be able to repair the chip where the mangled software is stored. And the bad code was also too large for Voyager 1's computer to store both it and any newly uploaded instructions. Because the technology aboard Voyager 1 dates back to the 1960s and 1970s, the computer’s memory pales in comparison to any modern smartphone. Spilker said it’s roughly equivalent to the amount of memory in an electronic car key.

The team found a workaround, however: They could divide up the code into smaller parts and store them in different areas of the computer’s memory. Then, they could reprogram the section that needed fixing while ensuring that the entire system still worked cohesively.

That was a feat, because the longevity of the Voyager mission means there are no working test beds or simulators here on Earth to test the new bits of code before they are sent to the spacecraft.

“There were three different people looking through line by line of the patch of the code we were going to send up, looking for anything that they had missed,” Spilker said. “And so it was sort of an eyes-only check of the software that we sent up.”

The hard work paid off.

NASA reported the happy development Monday, writing in a post on X : “Sounding a little more like yourself, #Voyager1.” The spacecraft’s own social media account responded , saying, “Hi, it’s me.”

So far, the team has determined that Voyager 1 is healthy and operating normally. Spilker said the probe’s scientific instruments are on and appear to be working, but it will take some time for Voyager 1 to resume sending back science data.

Voyager 1 and its twin, the Voyager 2 probe, each launched in 1977 on missions to study the outer solar system. As it sped through the cosmos, Voyager 1 flew by Jupiter and Saturn, studying the planets’ moons up close and snapping images along the way.

Voyager 2, which is 12.6 billion miles away, had close encounters with Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and continues to operate as normal.

In 2012, Voyager 1 ventured beyond the solar system , becoming the first human-made object to enter interstellar space, or the space between stars. Voyager 2 followed suit in 2018.

Spilker, who first began working on the Voyager missions when she graduated college in 1977, said the missions could last into the 2030s. Eventually, though, the probes will run out of power or their components will simply be too old to continue operating.

Spilker said it will be tough to finally close out the missions someday, but Voyager 1 and 2 will live on as “our silent ambassadors.”

Both probes carry time capsules with them — messages on gold-plated copper disks that are collectively known as The Golden Record . The disks contain images and sounds that represent life on Earth and humanity’s culture, including snippets of music, animal sounds, laughter and recorded greetings in different languages. The idea is for the probes to carry the messages until they are possibly found by spacefarers in the distant future.

“Maybe in 40,000 years or so, they will be getting relatively close to another star,” Spilker said, “and they could be found at that point.”

Denise Chow is a science and space reporter for NBC News.

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Voyager’s New Horizon: NASA Engineers Tackle Thruster Buildup & Software Glitches

By Jet Propulsion Laboratory October 23, 2023

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is depicted in this artist’s concept traveling through interstellar space, or the space between stars, which it entered in 2012. Traveling on a different trajectory, its twin, Voyager 2, entered interstellar space in 2018. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

NASA ’s Voyager mission team is addressing challenges to ensure prolonged functionality of the two spacecraft. They’re mitigating thruster fuel residue issues and implementing a software patch to rectify a previous Voyager 1 glitch.

The efforts should help extend the lifetimes of the agency’s interstellar explorers.

Engineers for NASA’s Voyager mission are taking steps to help make sure both spacecraft, launched in 1977, continue to explore interstellar space for years to come.

One effort addresses fuel residue that seems to be accumulating inside narrow tubes in some of the thrusters on the spacecraft. The thrusters are used to keep each spacecraft’s antenna pointed at Earth. This type of buildup has been observed in a handful of other spacecraft.

The team is also uploading a software patch to prevent the recurrence of a glitch that arose on Voyager 1 last year. Engineers resolved the glitch , and the patch is intended to prevent the issue from occurring again in Voyager 1 or arising in its twin, Voyager 2.

Thruster Buildup

The thrusters on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are primarily used to keep the spacecraft antennas pointed at Earth in order to communicate. Spacecraft can rotate in three directions – up and down, to the left and right, and around the central axis, like a wheel. As they do this, the thrusters automatically fire and reorient the spacecraft to keep their antennas pointed at Earth.

Propellant flows to the thrusters via fuel lines and then passes through smaller lines inside the thrusters called propellant inlet tubes that are 25 times narrower than the external fuel lines. Each thruster firing adds tiny amounts of propellant residue, leading to gradual buildup of material over decades. In some of the propellant inlet tubes, the buildup is becoming significant. To slow that buildup, the mission has begun letting the two spacecraft rotate slightly farther in each direction before firing the thrusters. This will reduce the frequency of thruster firings.

The adjustments to the thruster rotation range were made by commands sent in September and October, and they allow the spacecraft to move almost 1 degree farther in each direction than in the past. The mission is also performing fewer, longer firings, which will further reduce the total number of firings done on each spacecraft.

The adjustments have been carefully devised to ensure minimal impact on the mission. While more rotating by the spacecraft could mean bits of science data are occasionally lost – akin to being on a phone call where the person on the other end cuts out occasionally – the team concluded the plan will enable the Voyagers to return more data over time.

Engineers can’t know for sure when the thruster propellant inlet tubes will become completely clogged, but they expect that with these precautions, that won’t happen for at least five more years, possibly much longer. The team can take additional steps in the coming years to extend the lifetime of the thrusters even more.

“This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don’t have a playbook,” said Linda Spilker, project scientist for the mission as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “But they continue to come up with creative solutions.”

Patching Things Up

In 2022, the onboard computer that orients the Voyager 1 spacecraft with Earth began to send back garbled status reports, despite otherwise continuing to operate normally. It took mission engineers months to pinpoint the issue . The attitude articulation and control system (AACS) was misdirecting commands, writing them into the computer memory instead of carrying them out. One of those missed commands wound up garbling the AACS status report before it could reach engineers on the ground.

The team determined the AACS had entered into an incorrect mode; however, they couldn’t determine the cause and thus aren’t sure if the issue could arise again. The software patch should prevent that.

“This patch is like an insurance policy that will protect us in the future and help us keep these probes going as long as possible,” said JPL ’s Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager. “These are the only spacecraft to ever operate in interstellar space, so the data they’re sending back is uniquely valuable to our understanding of our local universe.”

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have traveled more than 15 billion and 12 billion miles from Earth, respectively. At those distances, the patch instructions will take over 18 hours to travel to the spacecraft. Because of the spacecraft’s age and the communication lag time, there’s some risk the patch could overwrite essential code or have other unintended effects on the spacecraft. To reduce those risks, the team has spent months writing, reviewing, and checking the code. As an added safety precaution, Voyager 2 will receive the patch first and serve as a testbed for its twin. Voyager 1 is farther from Earth than any other spacecraft, making its data more valuable.

The team will upload the patch and do a readout of the AACS memory to make sure it’s in the right place on Friday, October 20. If no immediate issues arise, the team will issue a command on Saturday, October 28, to see if the patch is operating as it should.

More About the Voyager Mission

Initially, the Voyager mission was planned for just four years, with both probes destined to pass Saturn and Jupiter . The mission was later extended for Voyager 2 to visit Uranus and Neptune , marking its unique journey to the ice giants. In 1990, another extension aimed to send the probes beyond the heliosphere, the sun’s protective bubble. Voyager 1 achieved this milestone in 2012, followed by Voyager 2 in 2018.

JPL, a division of Caltech in Pasadena, is responsible for the construction and operation of the Voyager spacecraft. The Voyager missions operate under the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory.

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• NASA's Voyager Team Focuses on Software Patch, Thrusters NASA's Voyager Team Focuses ...

This news is classified in: Aerospace Space

Oct 23, 2023

NASA's Voyager Team Focuses on Software Patch, Thrusters

The efforts should help extend the lifetimes of the agency's interstellar explorers..

Engineers for NASA’s Voyager mission are taking steps to help make sure both spacecraft, launched in 1977, continue to explore interstellar space for years to come.

One effort addresses fuel residue that seems to be accumulating inside narrow tubes in some of the thrusters on the spacecraft. The thrusters are used to keep each spacecraft’s antenna pointed at Earth. This type of buildup has been observed in a handful of other spacecraft.

The team is also uploading a software patch to prevent the recurrence of a glitch that arose on Voyager 1 last year. Engineers resolved the glitch, and the patch is intended to prevent the issue from occurring again in Voyager 1 or arising in its twin, Voyager 2.

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Thruster Buildup The thrusters on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are primarily used to keep the spacecraft antennas pointed at Earth in order to communicate. Spacecraft can rotate in three directions – up and down, to the left and right, and around the central axis, like a wheel. As they do this, the thrusters automatically fire and reorient the spacecraft to keep their antennas pointed at Earth.

Propellant flows to the thrusters via fuel lines and then passes through smaller lines inside the thrusters called propellant inlet tubes that are 25 times narrower than the external fuel lines. Each thruster firing adds tiny amounts of propellant residue, leading to gradual buildup of material over decades. In some of the propellant inlet tubes, the buildup is becoming significant. To slow that buildup, the mission has begun letting the two spacecraft rotate slightly farther in each direction before firing the thrusters. This will reduce the frequency of thruster firings.

The adjustments to the thruster rotation range were made by commands sent in September and October, and they allow the spacecraft to move almost 1 degree farther in each direction than in the past. The mission is also performing fewer, longer firings, which will further reduce the total number of firings done on each spacecraft.

The adjustments have been carefully devised to ensure minimal impact on the mission. While more rotating by the spacecraft could mean bits of science data are occasionally lost – akin to being on a phone call where the person on the other end cuts out occasionally – the team concluded the plan will enable the Voyagers to return more data over time.

Engineers can’t know for sure when the thruster propellant inlet tubes will become completely clogged, but they expect that with these precautions, that won’t happen for at least five more years, possibly much longer. The team can take additional steps in the coming years to extend the lifetime of the thrusters even more.

“This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don’t have a playbook,” said Linda Spilker, project scientist for the mission as NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “But they continue to come up with creative solutions.”

Patching Things Up In 2022, the onboard computer that orients the Voyager 1 spacecraft with Earth began to send back garbled status reports, despite otherwise continuing to operate normally. It took mission engineers months to pinpoint the issue. The attitude articulation and control system (AACS) was misdirecting commands, writing them into the computer memory instead of carrying them out. One of those missed commands wound up garbling the AACS status report before it could reach engineers on the ground.

The team determined the AACS had entered into an incorrect mode; however, they couldn’t determine the cause and thus aren’t sure if the issue could arise again. The software patch should prevent that.

“This patch is like an insurance policy that will protect us in the future and help us keep these probes going as long as possible,” said JPL’s Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager. “These are the only spacecraft to ever operate in interstellar space, so the data they’re sending back is uniquely valuable to our understanding of our local universe.”

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have traveled more than 15 billion and 12 billion miles from Earth, respectively. At those distances, the patch instructions will take over 18 hours to travel to the spacecraft. Because of the spacecraft’s age and the communication lag time, there’s some risk the patch could overwrite essential code or have other unintended effects on the spacecraft. To reduce those risks, the team has spent months writing, reviewing, and checking the code. As an added safety precaution, Voyager 2 will receive the patch first and serve as a testbed for its twin. Voyager 1 is farther from Earth than any other spacecraft, making its data more valuable.

The team will upload the patch and do a readout of the AACS memory to make sure it’s in the right place on Friday, Oct. 20. If no immediate issues arise, the team will issue a command on Saturday, Oct. 28, to see if the patch is operating as it should.

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Work to resolve binary babble from Voyager 1 is ongoing

You think your latency is bad how about 45 hours to see if a command worked.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has confirmed that work to resolve a data issue aboard Voyager 1 continues, almost two months since the spacecraft began spouting gibberish.

The good news is that engineers can send commands to the spacecraft and have confirmed that those commands are being received. However, the distances involved mean that the process is hugely time consuming. According to JPL, it takes 22.5 hours for a message to reach the spacecraft and another 22.5 hours for the response to be received.

Thus, engineers must wait 45 hours to see if a command has the expected outcome.

The Register understands that "all available talents" are being used to resolve the problem. Considering the age of the probe and the fact that it is running on so many backup systems, such issues are inevitable.

Dr Garry Hunt, a member of the original Voyager team, told us: "This certainly shows the value of having backup systems and duplications."

According to Hunt, it is also a reminder that "commercial space organizations will not be able to afford to work in this way so we can expect more failures in the new space age."

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That said, Voyager 1's mission is not over by any stretch of the imagination, and Voyager 2 continues its journey unaffected by the travails of its sibling.

The problem is an issue with one of Voyager 1's three onboard computers, called the Flight Data System (FDS). At the end of last year, the FDS started having issues communicating with Voyager's subsystems, which resulted in the Telemetry Modulation Unit (TMU) sending a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes back to Earth rather than the expected engineering and science data.

The Voyager team reckoned the issue was with the FDS and tried to restart it but to no avail.

The fact that the Voyager probes continue to function decades after their launch remains an impressive achievement, both on the part of the original engineers and designers and the teams that currently operate the spacecraft.

While JPL is suffering from some severe budget constraints in the short term, the Voyager mission remains a reminder that when considering space exploration, long-term thinking is for the best. ®

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Voyager 1 had a problem. Here's how NASA fixed it from 15 billion miles away.

Working from more than 15 billion miles away, NASA engineers have solved a computer problem aboard Voyager 1 , allowing the probe to send readable data five months after a chip error made its transmissions impossible to decipher.

Voyager 1, along with its sister craft, Voyager 2, are  robotic probes  that were launched in 1977. Voyager 1 reached interstellar space in 2012. It's now 15.1 billion miles away, the farthest from Earth a human-made object has ever traveled.

Learn more: Closer look at Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 .

Voyager 2 entered interstellar space − the space between the stars, starting at abou t 11 billion miles from our sun − in 2018. It's now 12.7 billion miles away.

Voyager 1's computer glitch garbled the science and engineering data the craft sends to Earth, which rendered it unreadable. That started on Nov. 14, 2023.

How did engineers fix Voyager's problem?

Engineers from NASA and the Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered a single computer chip inside the spacecraft’s Flight Data Subsystem – which collects science and engineering information and transmits it to Earth – had malfunctioned.

Can't see our graphics? Click here .

The chip stored part of the Flight Data Subsystem's memory and software code. Engineers could still receive data from Voyager 1, but it was scrambled.

The chip could not be repaired. Instead, engineers moved software code from the chip into a different part of the subsystem's memory system.

The code was too large to to be stored in a single location in the spacecraft. Engineers divided the code into sections and stored them in different places within the subsystem. The code sections were adjusted to make sure they worked as a whole.

Engineers tested the fix by moving a code that transmits data about the spacecraft. They were rewarded with a transmission from Voyager that contained readable data about the craft's status.

All that took time. Voyager is moving about 38,000 mph. Because it's so far away, it takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to reach Voyager. It takes another 22.5 hours for the spacecraft’s reply to reach antenna networks on Earth.

What happens next?

Engineers will reposition and synchronize the other parts of the code. That should allow Voyager 1 to start sending readable data on what it finds as it moves farther away from Earth.

SOURCE USA TODAY Network reporting and research; NASA/Jet Propulsion Laboratory/California Institute of Technology; Reuters

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The Voyager Project was conceived in the early '60s as an unmanned mission to the outer planets (Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune and Pluto). Launch was accomplished in the late summer of 1977. The two craft completed their fly-bys of Jupiter and Saturn in mid-1981. Voyager 2 encountered Uranus in January of 1986, and Neptune in August of 1989. Voyager discovered seven new moons orbiting Uranus as it "flew by." Congressman Bill Nelson suggested they be named for the seven lost crew members of STS 51L. 4 inches wide.

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News | October 23, 2023

Nasa’s voyager team focuses on software patch, thrusters.

The efforts should help extend the lifetimes of the agency's interstellar explorers.

Engineers for NASA's Voyager mission are taking steps to help make sure both spacecraft, launched in 1977, continue to explore interstellar space for years to come.

One effort addresses fuel residue that seems to be accumulating inside narrow tubes in some of the thrusters on the spacecraft. The thrusters are used to keep each spacecraft's antenna pointed at Earth. This type of buildup has been observed in a handful of other spacecraft.

The team is also uploading a software patch to prevent the recurrence of a glitch that arose on Voyager 1 last year. Engineers resolved the glitch , and the patch is intended to prevent the issue from occurring again in Voyager 1 or arising in its twin, Voyager 2.

Thruster Buildup

The thrusters on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are primarily used to keep the spacecraft antennas pointed at Earth in order to communicate. Spacecraft can rotate in three directions - up and down, to the left and right, and around the central axis, like a wheel. As they do this, the thrusters automatically fire and reorient the spacecraft to keep their antennas pointed at Earth.

Propellant flows to the thrusters via fuel lines and then passes through smaller lines inside the thrusters called propellant inlet tubes that are 25 times narrower than the external fuel lines. Each thruster firing adds tiny amounts of propellant residue, leading to gradual buildup of material over decades. In some of the propellant inlet tubes, the buildup is becoming significant. To slow that buildup, the mission has begun letting the two spacecraft rotate slightly farther in each direction before firing the thrusters. This will reduce the frequency of thruster firings.

The adjustments to the thruster rotation range were made by commands sent in September and October, and they allow the spacecraft to move almost 1 degree farther in each direction than in the past. The mission is also performing fewer, longer firings, which will further reduce the total number of firings done on each spacecraft.

The adjustments have been carefully devised to ensure minimal impact on the mission. While more rotating by the spacecraft could mean bits of science data are occasionally lost - akin to being on a phone call where the person on the other end cuts out occasionally - the team concluded the plan will enable the Voyagers to return more data over time.

Engineers can't know for sure when the thruster propellant inlet tubes will become completely clogged, but they expect that with these precautions, that won't happen for at least five more years, possibly much longer. The team can take additional steps in the coming years to extend the lifetime of the thrusters even more.

“This far into the mission, the engineering team is being faced with a lot of challenges for which we just don't have a playbook,” said Linda Spilker, project scientist for the mission as NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California. “But they continue to come up with creative solutions.”

Patching Things Up

In 2022, the onboard computer that orients the Voyager 1 spacecraft with Earth began to send back garbled status reports, despite otherwise continuing to operate normally. It took mission engineers months to pinpoint the issue . The attitude articulation and control system (AACS) was misdirecting commands, writing them into the computer memory instead of carrying them out. One of those missed commands wound up garbling the AACS status report before it could reach engineers on the ground.

The team determined the AACS had entered into an incorrect mode; however, they couldn't determine the cause and thus aren't sure if the issue could arise again. The software patch should prevent that.

“This patch is like an insurance policy that will protect us in the future and help us keep these probes going as long as possible,” said JPL's Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager. “These are the only spacecraft to ever operate in interstellar space, so the data they're sending back is uniquely valuable to our understanding of our local universe.”

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have traveled more than 15 billion and 12 billion miles from Earth, respectively. At those distances, the patch instructions will take over 18 hours to travel to the spacecraft. Because of the spacecraft's age and the communication lag time, there's some risk the patch could overwrite essential code or have other unintended effects on the spacecraft. To reduce those risks, the team has spent months writing, reviewing, and checking the code. As an added safety precaution, Voyager 2 will receive the patch first and serve as a testbed for its twin. Voyager 1 is farther from Earth than any other spacecraft, making its data more valuable.

The team will upload the patch and do a readout of the AACS memory to make sure it’s in the right place on Friday, Oct. 20. If no immediate issues arise, the team will issue a command on Saturday, Oct. 28, to see if the patch is operating as it should.

More About the Mission

The Voyager mission was originally scheduled to last only four years, sending both probes past Saturn and Jupiter. NASA extended the mission so that Voyager 2 could visit Uranus and Neptune; it is still the only spacecraft ever to have encountered the ice giants. In 1990, NASA extended the mission again, this time with the goal of sending the probes outside the heliosphere, a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun. Voyager 1 reached the boundary in 2012, while Voyager 2 (traveling slower and in a different direction than its twin) reached it in 2018.

A division of Caltech in Pasadena, JPL built and operates the Voyager spacecraft. The Voyager missions are a part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about the Voyager spacecraft, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/voyager

News Media Contact

Calla Cofield Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 626-808-2469 [email protected] 2023-148

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Trio of tiny autonomous NASA rovers will launch to the moon next year

The three spacecraft will be unleashed on the moon with only high-level orders.

A trio of miniature autonomous NASA rovers will soon head for the moon, with the aim of boosting the efficiency of exploration missions.

The four-wheeled, carry-on-suitcase-sized moon rovers — known as Cooperative Autonomous Distributed Robotic Exploration (CADRE) — will work as a team and carry out tasks with only initial, high-level input from humans. 

The intrepid trio will travel to the moon aboard Intuitive Machines ' third lunar lander, IM-3 , as part of NASA's Commercial Lunar Payload Services (CLPS) initiative. Launch is scheduled for 2024.

Related: Missions to the moon: Past, present and future

The mission will target the intriguing Reiner Gamma region, one of a number of mysterious lunar swirls with an associated local magnetic field.

The Reiner Gamma swirl is located in Oceanus Procellarum ("Ocean of Storms"), on the western edge of the near side of the moon and just north of the equator, where midday temperatures could reach up to 237 degrees Fahrenheit (114 degrees Celsius). 

CADRE's rovers will be lowered onto the surface of the moon via tethers and find a spot to catch sunlight and charge their batteries. They will then spend the rest of the roughly 14-Earth-day-long lunar daytime carrying out experiments in order to test their capabilities.

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While their mission will be brief, it could influence exploration in the long term. By taking simultaneous measurements from multiple locations, the rovers will seek to demonstrate how multi-robot missions could potentially enable new science or support astronauts.

"Our mission is to demonstrate that a network of mobile robots can cooperate to accomplish a task without human intervention — autonomously," said Subha Comandur, the CADRE project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, in a statement . 

"It could change how we do exploration in the future. The question for future missions will become: 'How many rovers do we send, and what will they do together?'" Comandur added.

The trio will receive orders from their lunar lander, divide tasks among themselves and decide how to execute their plans safely.

"The only instruction is, for example, 'Go explore this region,' and the rovers figure out everything else: when they'll do the driving, what path they'll take, how they'll maneuver around local hazards," said JPL's Jean-Pierre de la Croix, CADRE's principal investigator.

"You only tell them the high-level goal, and they have to determine how to accomplish it."

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The rovers will carry out their roles under the gaze of a monitoring camera atop the 13-foot-tall (4 meters) lander. These roles include driving in formation and avoiding obstacles, with each robot exploring a patch of lunar surface covering 4,300 square feet (400 square meters) while using stereo cameras to create a topographic 3D map. The rovers also carry ground-penetrating radars, which will provide a glimpse as far as 33 feet (10 m) into the subsurface.

A successful run will show that a multi-spacecraft approach could help us explore hazardous but scientifically rewarding planetary body terrain, mission team members said

CADRE is one of four sets of payloads flying on IM-3. The Nova-C Lander will launch on a SpaceX Falcon 9 rocket and carry a total mass of roughly 203 pounds (92 kilograms) of investigative mission payloads.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Andrew is a freelance space journalist with a focus on reporting on China's rapidly growing space sector. He began writing for Space.com in 2019 and writes for SpaceNews, IEEE Spectrum, National Geographic, Sky & Telescope, New Scientist and others. Andrew first caught the space bug when, as a youngster, he saw Voyager images of other worlds in our solar system for the first time. Away from space, Andrew enjoys trail running in the forests of Finland. You can follow him on Twitter  @AJ_FI .

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