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NASA engineers have fully revived the far-flung Voyager 2 probe on the edge of the solar system after fixing a computer glitch that scrambled its messages home for nearly three weeks.
A single bit flip in one location in the 33-year-old probe's memory storage caused the problem, and was remotely reset Sunday by engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. After a computer reset, the Voyager 2 is back on track, they said.
The malfunction began April 22 while Voyager 2 was flying 8.6 billion miles (13.8 billion km) from Earth in the heliosphere, the magnetic bubble that surrounds our solar system. Mission scientists could not decipher the probe's science data messages and put the spacecraft in an engineering mode to just send health updates to Earth.
The actual cause of the computer glitch is still unknown, NASA's Voyager 2 project manager Ed Massey told SPACE.com.
Voyager 2 hiccup in deep space
Memory bit flips and other electronic problems have affected spacecraft, and even Voyager 2 and its twin Voyager 1, in the past. But they occurred when the spacecraft were much closer to Earth, around 1 or 2 astronomical units (AU).
One AU is the distance between the Earth and the sun, about 93 million miles (151 million km). That's close enough for their onboard systems to be affected by the electric charge of the sun's solar wind, Massey said.
"In some spacecraft that are closer to the sun one could think of single event upsets caused by solar activity. But we're so far away, it's hard to say that's what caused it," he added. "We're like 93, 94 AU out."
A single bit flip in one location in the 33-year-old probe's memory storage caused the problem, and was remotely reset Sunday by engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, Calif. After a computer reset, the Voyager 2 is back on track, they said.
The malfunction began April 22 while Voyager 2 was flying 8.6 billion miles (13.8 billion km) from Earth in the heliosphere, the magnetic bubble that surrounds our solar system. Mission scientists could not decipher the probe's science data messages and put the spacecraft in an engineering mode to just send health updates to Earth.
The actual cause of the computer glitch is still unknown, NASA's Voyager 2 project manager Ed Massey told SPACE.com.
Voyager 2 hiccup in deep space
Memory bit flips and other electronic problems have affected spacecraft, and even Voyager 2 and its twin Voyager 1, in the past. But they occurred when the spacecraft were much closer to Earth, around 1 or 2 astronomical units (AU).
One AU is the distance between the Earth and the sun, about 93 million miles (151 million km). That's close enough for their onboard systems to be affected by the electric charge of the sun's solar wind, Massey said.
"In some spacecraft that are closer to the sun one could think of single event upsets caused by solar activity. But we're so far away, it's hard to say that's what caused it," he added. "We're like 93, 94 AU out."
