OH NO: NASA Needs a ‘Miracle’ to Save Voyager 1.

The nearly 50-year-old space probe, which is currently over 15 billion miles away, encountered the malfunction on November 14, 2023. This has hindered its capacity to relay vital measurements from its scientific instruments and fundamental engineering information. As a result, the mission’s support team in Southern California has been left in the dark about key parameters related to the craft’s propulsion, power, and control systems.

“It would be the biggest miracle if we get it back. We certainly haven’t given up,” Voyager’s Project Manager Suzanne Dodd told Ars Technica in an interview. “There are other things we can try. But this is, by far, the most serious since I’ve been project manager.”

Engineers believe that the problem originated in the Flight Data System (FDS), specifically related to “frame syncing” data, and suspect that it may be due to corrupted memory within the FDS. This has hindered the team’s ability to pinpoint the exact location of the FDS memory corruption, as the lack of detailed telemetry data from Voyager 1 has made it challenging to identify the root cause of the issue.

The complexity of diagnosing and rectifying a problem occurring at such an immense distance, compounded by the age of the spacecraft and its fifty-year-old technology, has underscored the unprecedented technical and logistical challenge facing the mission’s support team.

Still, almost 50 years and 15 billion miles is a helluva run.