After pausing its communications, NASA successfully managed to reconnect with the Voyager 1 spacecraft. The American space company announced the news in October but the team is working to find what caused the hiccup.
How NASA used a 1981 radio
In a blog post on the company’s official website, NASA says the spacecraft recently turned off forcing them to pause the opening of communication lines one of its two radio transmitters.
While it may seem the shutdown was made possible by the spacecraft’s fault protection system, the technicians are working hard to detect the issue. The fault protection system plays a huge role in communication as it autonomously responds to onboard issues.
According to the statement, in case the spacecraft overdraws its power supply, fault protection will conserve power by turning off systems that aren’t essential for keeping the spacecraft flying.
However, this may take days to weeks before the team can find the reasons of a shutdown and identify the underlying issue that triggered the fault protection system.
When the flight crew which is based at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, sends instructions to the spacecraft via the agency’s Deep Space Network, Voyager 1 can pass back engineering data that the team assesses to determine how the spacecraft responded to the command.
This process normally takes a couple of days — almost 23 hours for the command to travel more than (24 billion kilometers) from Earth to the spacecraft, and another 23 hours for the data to travel back.
“On Oct. 16, the flight team sent a command to turn on one of the spacecraft’s heaters. While Voyager 1 should have had ample power to operate the heater, the command triggered the fault protection system,” reads the statement on NASA’s website.
“The team learned of the issue when the Deep Space Network couldn’t detect Voyager 1’s signal on Oct. 18.
“The spacecraft typically communicates with Earth using what’s called an X-band radio transmitter, named for the specific frequency it uses. The flight team correctly hypothesized that the fault protection system had lowered the rate at which the transmitter was sending back data.”
NASA engineers find the signal later
With the mode said to require less power from the spacecraft, it also changes the X-band signal that the Deep Space Network needs to listen for.
After a brief pause, NASA Engineers were able to find the signal later that day, and Voyager 1 otherwise seemed to be in a stable state as the team began to investigate what had happened.
Communication comes to a halt but re-established
A day later, it was announced that communication appeared to stop entirely but the flight crew thought that Voyager 1’s fault protection system was triggered twice more and that it turned off the X-band transmitter and switched to a second radio transmitter called the S-band.
“While the S-band uses less power, Voyager 1 had not used it to communicate with Earth since 1981,” adds the space agency.
“It uses a different frequency than the X-band transmitters signal is significantly fainter. The flight team was not certain the S-band could be detected at Earth due to the spacecraft’s distance, but engineers with the Deep Space Network were able to find it.”
Rather than risk turning the X-band back on before finding what triggered the fault protection system, the spacecraft or the flight team sent a command on Oct. 22 to confirm the S-band transmitter was working.
Considering this historical moment in using a radio that was last used more than 40 years ago, it is interesting to see what NASA technicians will discover as an issue.