RT
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft behaved strangely recently and sent random bits of data from 24 billion km away in space to Earth.
Reports say that NASA engineers are puzzled by this defect and are working to fix it.
Voyager 1 was the first spacecraft to cross the heliosphere and is currently the farthest human-made object from Earth.
Currently, the probe is located about 24 billion km (15 billion miles) from Earth and has been active for 4.5 decades. It is now sending strange messages that are binary data consisting of only 1’s and 0’s, due to a glitch of some kind.
Binary data describes a specific line of current in an electrical circuit that is either on (1) or off (0).
To try to address the problem, scientists sent commands to the probe. But because Voyager 1 is so far from Earth, sending messages takes about 22 hours. This means it will take 45 hours to find out whether scientists’ attempts to recover the probe’s computers have succeeded.
This is not the first time that the Voyager 1 probe has delivered random and strange data.
In May 2022, the probe sent back data about its location and direction in space that conflicted with what NASA knew about its location.
At that time, engineers at NASA were able to discover and solve the problem. But it took several months.
“A mystery like this is somewhat similar to the trajectory at this point in the Voyager mission,” Susan Dodd, a project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, said at the time.
The probe was launched from Cape Canaveral with Voyager 2 in 1977 as part of NASA’s Voyager program to explore the planets Jupiter and Saturn.
The mission was supposed to last only five years, but the instruments remained in deep space for about 45 years.
Since the launch of the two probes, they have traveled an astonishing distance of 24 billion km from Earth, which is farther than any man-made object in space.
Last year, NASA announced that the program was nearing its end, as the two spacecraft entered their final phase.
By 2025, the two vehicles, which operate via radioisotope thermoelectric generators, are expected to run out of power.
Meanwhile, the space agency has eliminated features needed to keep the machines running until then.
