The NASA scientists said in May that the data from the attitude-control system was not accurate. According to the engineering team, the glitch is still going on.
Engineers are looking through old manual to find a fix.
In 1977 there was a design lifetime of five years to study Jupiter, Neptune, and other moons.
Both of the spaceships are still working after 45 years in space. The first human-made object to venture beyond the boundary of our sun's influence went into space in 2012 Data is being sent back from beyond the solar system.
Suzanne Dodd said that nobody thought it would last as long as it has.
Efforts to fix the problems of the spaceship were made more difficult by the fact that it was built in the early 70s.
The technical term for the paperwork containing details on the spacecraft's design and procedures may have been lost or forgotten.
Dodd said that thousands of engineers worked on the project.
There wasn't a big push to have a project document library as they retired in the 70's and 80's. Dodd said that people would bring their boxes to their garage. More robust records of documentation are kept by NASA.
Dodd and the rest of the team can request access to the boxes with the documents and schematic that are stored off-site. It can be difficult.
Dodd said that getting that information requires you to figure out who is working on the project.
Engineers who helped design the attitude-control system have had to look for boxes under their names. Dodd said it was a timeConsuming process.
The attitude-control system of the spaceship keeps the high-gain antenna pointed at Earth so that it can send data home.
A status on the health of the system is whatmetry data is about. Dodd said that they don't know if the attitude-control system is working because the data from the system is garbled.
Dodd said that the engineers haven't been able to fix the glitch because they haven't been able to reset the system. Dodd believes it is due to an aging part. She said that not everything can work in space.
The location of the glitch may affect it. The data shows that high-energy charged particles are out in space.
If it were to happen, it could cause more damage to the electronics, but we can't say for sure.
It's still receiving and executing commands from Earth despite its orientation issues, and its antenna is still pointed towards us.
Dodd said there had been no degradation in the signal strength.
As part of an ongoing power management effort that has increased in recent years, engineers have been powered down non-technical systems on board the Voyager probes, hoping to keep them going through the year 2030.
The first direct evidence of the heliopause, as well as the discovery of unknown moons and rings, have been aided by the mission.
The science data is very valuable and we want the mission to last as long as possible.
"They're still talking to us, but it's really remarkable that both of them are still operating and sending back data, even though there are some small problems," Dodd said.
The original article was published by Business Insider.
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