• Both Voyagers are being sent a software patch after Voyager 1 began sending garbled reports back to Earth last year.
• The patch will travel 18 hours from Earth before arriving at the spacecraft.
• The patch will be tested on Voyager 2 owing to the fact that Voyager 1 is further into interstellar space and thus, its data is more valuable.

Originally launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 has continued its mission through the cosmos. The spacecraft is currently the most distant human-made object in space at 24 million kilometres away which was seemingly a great time for the craft to develop a problem.

Last year, Voyager 1 began sending back garbled reports which were eventually traced back to the attitude articulation and control system (AACS) where commands were being written to the onboard computer’s memory rather than being executed. Thankfully the spacecraft continued to operate nominally.

Despite that normal operation, NASA wanted to make sure it mitigated any issues further down the line and so it developed a software patch.

“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. 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 project manager at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Suzanne Dodd said in a statement.

The patch took more than 18 hours to travel from Earth to Voyager 1. However, NASA needed to test that the patch worked as intended so it tested the software on Voyager 2 first. Voyager 2 was selected as the testbed purely because Voyager 1 is further away making its data far more valuable. The patch was deployed on Friday 20th October and it will issue a command to see if the patch works as intended on 28th October.

In addition to the patch, NASA is making provisions to protect the thrusters on its interstellar spacecraft. As you might imagine after 46 years, things start to deteriorate and get clogged up. To combat this NASA has made adjustments to how the thrusters fire.

“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,” NASA explains.

These adjustments will see the spacecraft rotation slightly further (by nearly one degree) before the thrusters fire leading to fewer fires done by the spacecraft. While there is a risk that some data will be lost, over time the Voyagers will be able to send more data back to Earth.

We’re just amazed that a 46-year-old piece of tech can be sent a software patch. And here we are awaiting the end-of-life of Windows 10 in two year’s time.

[Image – Franz Bachinger from Pixabay]