Since December 14, 2023, NASA’s Voyager-1 probe has been sending back to Earth a meaningless string of zeros and ones. At the beginning of March, the NASA team managed to obtain a full memory dump of the FDS unit responsible for creating the packets. This gave hope of identifying the root of the problems in the device, which reached the edge of the solar system. Now the confidence in success has become stronger; engineers calculated the faulty memory chip in the unit.

According to memory dump analysis, a memory chip in the flight data system (FDS) unit failed, affecting approximately 3% of the array. In operational state, the FDS unit collects telemetry and scientific data packets and then sends them to the transmitter. A malfunction in the memory chip resulted in the failure to initialize the program responsible for the operation of the FDS unit. There is currently no expert who can clarify the details of the Voyager computer architecture because the system was developed 50 years ago.

However, the problem has been determined to be caused by a hardware malfunction and can probably be fixed. Another thing is that many other complications are layered on top of this. Since the Voyager 1 probe is 24 billion km away from Earth, the signal takes 22.5 hours to reach it and the same time to return. Verifying each command takes a significant amount of time, and recovery can take months. Meanwhile, time is ticking; The probe’s battery life is also running out, and in a year or two there will be nothing left to salvage.

“Although it may take weeks or months, engineers are optimistic that they can find a way to keep the FDS operational without using unusable memory hardware, allowing Voyager 1 to begin returning science and engineering data again.” He said it at NASA.