NASA has started the painstaking process of updating the software on two of its spacecraft. This would be a tricky operation no matter the mission, but it's all the more perilous with the Voyager probes. These spacecraft have been traveling for decades and are the only operational probes outside our solar system. The patch is intended to rectify an issue that garbled communication from Voyager 1 in 2022, but there are no do-overs if the patch breaks the irreplaceable probes.
The Voyager team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) confirmed they have transmitted a software patch to Voyager 2 first. Since the spacecraft is more than 12 billion miles away, it took 18 hours for the data to reach it. There is some concern that initializing the software could overwrite or otherwise damage other parts of the probe's software. Given the age and distance, there's no way to know for sure it will work.
The communication issue in 2022 hit Voyager 1, which is even farther away from Earth, at a distance of 15 billion miles. JPL said at the time that Voyager 1 began sending corrupted telemetry data because the attitude articulation and control system (AACS) was passing data through the wrong onboard computer. The team eventually fixed it by telling the AACS system to switch to the correct computer. While Voyager 2 never experienced that problem, it is identical on a hardware and software level.
JPL says engineers have spent months writing, checking, and rechecking the code. Now that the patch has been transmitted, the team is completing a full readout of Voyager 2's AACS memory to ensure the patch is working as intended. If everything looks good, JPL will transmit a command to Voyager 2 on Oct 28 to test its functionality. Since Voyager 1 is farther away, its data is of higher value than Voyager 2. So, NASA has opted to install the patch first on that probe. If everything goes well, it will send the same software patch to Voyager 1 in the near future.
This isn't the only issue that the Voyager probes face. Just a few months ago, NASA misaligned the antenna on Voyager 2, causing it to go offline for a week. The sagging power generation on these spacecraft also prompted the shutdown of safety systems in early 2023.
Voyager 1 and 2 launched in 1977, visiting the outer planets before continuing on to interstellar space. They provide the only direct observations of conditions outside our little bubble of space, so NASA wants to keep them operating as long as possible. The Voyager spacecraft are expected to remain alive until at least 2026.
