Voyager 1 isn’t talking to us (Picture: Nasa)
We’re worried about Voyager 1.
One of Nasa’s longest-living missions, the spacecraft, and its twin Voyager 2,launched in 1977, and communicates using Nasa’s Deep Space Network to receive commands and transmit data to Earth.
But for the past three months, Voyager 1 has not been sending back data collected by its scientific equipment, Nasa said. Instead, it is simply firing home garbled strings of 0s and 1s.
However, the probe is seemingly receiving and executing commands just fine as it glides through space around 15 billion kilometres from Earth.
‘It would be the biggest miracle if we get it back,’ said Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd, speaking to Ars Technica.
‘There are other things we can try. But this is, by far, the most serious since I’ve been project manager.’
Saturn’s rings, captured by Voyager 1 (Picture: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty)
Nasa believes the problem has something to do with the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), as the 46-year-old probe has been sending back nonsense 1s and 0s in a repeated pattern since November 14.
However, it will take several weeks for engineers to develop a new plan to rectify the issues. And even then, after the team sends a command, they have to wait 45 hours for the craft to respond.
Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 have revolutionised our understanding of the solar system (Picture: Smith Collection/Gado/Getty)
As the probe was designed and built in the 1970s, its onboard technology is no longer state of the art, and its plans are not digitised.
‘The people who built the spacecraft are not alive anymore,’ said Ms Dodd.
‘We do have a reasonably good set of documentation, but a lot of it is in paper, so you do this archaeology dig to get documents.’
Voyager 1: the lowdown
- Voyager 1 is the first spacecraft to have left the solar system
- The probe has been flying for 46 years
- In 2012, it became the first humanmade spacecraft to reach interstellar space – the void beyond our solar system
- It is carrying a 12″ golden record, which contains the sights and sounds of planet Earth, should any other beings happen upon it
Voyager 2 is still operational, although Nasa did lose contact with it briefly last year after sending rogue instructions.
The Voyager spacecraft are the only probes in interstellar space.
However, Nasa’s New Horizons probe, which flew past Pluto in 2015, is on track to reach interstellar space in the 2040s.
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