NASA scientists said in May that the data from the AACS was not accurate. Engineers dug through old manual to find a fix.
The glitch was solved by the team in late August. The data was corrupted by a dead computer that beamed it into space.
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. In 2012 the very first human-made object ventured beyond the boundary of our Sun's influence and into the farthest reaches of space. The data is being sent back from beyond the Solar System.
Suzanne Dodd told Insider 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.
Thousands of engineers worked on the project during the first 12 years.
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 of documents and schematics 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.
The engineers who helped design the attitude-control system were the ones who had to look for boxes under their names.
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 didn't know if the attitude-control system was functioning properly because the telemetry readouts were garbled.
Dodd thought it was due to an aging part. She said over the summer that not everything works forever.
The location of the glitch may be influenced by 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.
The source of the garbled data was found in August by the engineers of the spaceship. They think it was caused by a faulty command.
Dodd said in the NASA statement that they were happy to have the data back. The team doesn't know why it happened.
We will look at everything that the AACS has been doing. We will be able to diagnose the problem that caused the issue. Dodd said that they still have more investigating to do.
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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