Voyager 1, the farthest man-made object in space currently, has stopped sending consistent data to Earth since November last year. Although NASA has not yet planned to give up, the fact presented to us is that Voyager 1 It may be time to end the mission.
NASA’s Voyager 1 probe, launched in 1977, was originally intended to take close-up images of Jupiter and Saturn. It successfully allowed us to see more clearly the active volcanoes, satellites, and planetary rings of other planets in the solar system; later, the mission, which was originally only for 4 years, The mission has been continuously extended to this day, and it has become the first man-made object to cross the boundaries of the solar system and venture into interstellar space. As Voyager 1 gradually moves away from the solar system, we have a deeper understanding that the earth is just a small point in the universe.
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But the old technology half a century ago has long been overwhelmed. In fact, Voyager 1 has not sent back useful data from interstellar space for several months.
These serious signs of aging that have to be faced can be traced back to May 2022, when the Voyager 1 probe suddenly began to send meaningless attitude control system (attitude articulation and control system, AACS) telemetry data. Fortunately, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory After 3 months of tinkering, the source of the fault was successfully found. It turned out that the AACS suddenly processed messages through the long-defunct onboard computer in some way. After sending a command to ask the AACS to switch back to the correct computer to send data, the garbled code problem was successfully solved.
However, in December 2023, Voyager 1 started gibbering again and stopped transmitting data back to Earth. It has experienced repeated malfunctions and the outlook is grim. Now it seems to be missing.
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Considering that Voyager 1 is currently 24.4 billion kilometers away from us and traveling through interstellar space at a speed of 23,612 kilometers per hour, it will take JPL engineers about 2 days to send a signal to the spacecraft and receive a response (22 hours one way), although the team is still willing to spend Time is trying to communicate with Voyager 1, and it is not ready to give up yet, but everyone must be mentally prepared that the great scientific mission of Voyager 1 is coming to an end.
(Source of first picture:NASA）
