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1993-05-03
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PUBLIC INFORMATION OFFICE
JET PROPULSION LABORATORY
CALIFORNIA INSTITUTE OF TECHNOLOGY
NATIONAL AERONAUTICS AND SPACE ADMINISTRATION
PASADENA, CALIF. 91109. TELEPHONE (818) 354-5011
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE October 26, 1989
NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft experienced an
interruption of its telemetry signal between Monday afternoon
and Tuesday midnight, and Wednesday resumed normal
communications with Earth.
The spacecraft, which has been measuring the
interplanetary environment in the outer solar system since
its 1980 observations of the Saturn system, is north of the
ecliptic plane in which the planets orbit and about 3.7
billion miles from Earth. The round-trip communication time
is 11 hours.
Voyager 1 is operated by the same team at the Jet
Propulsion Laboratory which recently conducted Voyager 2's
encounter with Neptune, and is tracked about 12 hours per day
by the NASA/JPL Deep Space Network.
After a successful tracking pass early Monday,
engineers found at the start of the afternoon's pass (about
4:30 p.m. PDT) that Voyager 1 was sending a radio carrier
wave with no data.
After analyzing the situation, they prepared and
sent corrective "reset" commands, which could be followed by
switching over to backup telemetry electronics. This proved
unnecessary, for Wednesday morning (starting about midnightPDT Tuesday) Voyager was talking again.
Apparently a "single-event upset," possibly from a
cosmic ray, had caused the spacecraft to switch from the main
telemetry line to a backup midway in the internal signal
path; a simple "reset" corrected this.
Voyager 1 will continue operating with Voyager 2 in
the Voyager Interstellar Mission to the boundary of the Sun's
influence and the interstellar medium beyond. The mission is
managed by JPL for NASA's Office of Space Science and
Applications.
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10/25/89JHW