NASA's Voyager 1 probe is malfunctioning in deep space due to a critical memory error

Christopher Harper
·2 min read
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Shot of the NASA Voyager 1 probe, taken from the official voyager.jpl.nasa.gov site.
Shot of the NASA Voyager 1 probe, taken from the official voyager.jpl.nasa.gov site.

NASA's Voyager 1, one half of the Voyager pair of probes that have been the longest-operating spacecraft in history, is currently malfunctioning in deep space without science or engineering data coming back to Earth— including telemetry that's critical to moving and properly aligning the spacecraft.

According to information from NASA and reporting originally from Ars Technica, this happened due to a memory error occurring within the Voyager 1's onboard "Flight Data System (FDS)," which uses an older version of volatile memory that has seemingly corrupted after all these years of operation. Both NASA's Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched in 1977, which means it took about 45 years for Voyager 1's primitive RAM equivalent to fail. That's impressive for primitive tech, but it just may wind up retiring the most aged spacecraft out there.

Even if the current memory error that has rendered Voyager 1 unusable can be fixed, these Voyager probes are both expected to slowly decay in their usability over time. This is because they use nuclear batteries which will lose power year-over-year, requiring instruments on the spacecraft to be disabled in order to keep operating it once the battery has lost enough power.

NASA's Voyager program is a staple piece of human history and outer space research, but it seems apparent that the two Voyager probes themselves won't last forever. This is unfortunate, since the Voyager 1 is currently the farthest human-made object from Earth— essentially the peak of our deep space exploration, in other words.

The Voyager team at NASA is still doing what it can in an attempt to preserve the Voyager 1 probes, but at time of writing it seems fairly uncertain whether or not it can succeed. Without direct access to telemetry, which the memory error ruined, the exact cause of the memory error can't be easily identified from Earth. One solution being considered is sending the Voyager 1 operating commands for when it flew by Jupiter and Saturn over 40 years ago, potentially revealing what aspect of FDS memory is causing the problem.