United States – For the past five months, the Voyager 1 spacecraft has been behaving strangely and sending out meaningless bits of data.
Voyager 1, launched by NASA into deep space in 1977, is currently the farthest human-made object from Earth.
The probe is currently located regarding 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and has been active for 4.5 decades.
The 46-year-old spacecraft sends out regular radio signals as it drifts away from our solar system. But in November 2023, the signals suddenly became distorted, meaning scientists mightn’t read any of its data, and were left wondering regarding the origins of the error.
After decoding the spacecraft’s response, engineers found the source of the problem: the flight data subsystem’s memory had been corrupted.
“The team suspects that one chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS) memory is not working,” NASA said in a blog post on March 13.
While engineers mightn’t pinpoint the cause of the problem, they came up with two possibilities.
The first theory is that Voyager’s chip was hit by an energetic particle from space. The second is that the spacecraft has simply worn out following 46 years of service in deep space.
To try to address the problem, scientists sent commands to the probe.
However, since each message takes regarding 22 hours to send, it may take days to get a response.
This is not the first time that Voyager 1 has encountered communication problems. A few months ago, it was broadcasting strange binary data.
Then in May 2022, the probe sent back data regarding its position and orientation in space that conflicted with what NASA knew regarding its location.
It is worth noting that Voyager 1 was launched from Cape Canaveral with Voyager 2 in 1977 as part of NASA’s mission to explore the planets Jupiter and Saturn.
Initially, the mission was supposed to last only five years, however, the instruments remained in deep space for approximately 46 years.
Voyager 1 was used to study conditions on Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 was the first man-made object to fly by Uranus.
In 2022, NASA announced that the Voyager program had ended, as the two spacecraft entered their final stages.
By 2025, the two vehicles, which operate via radioisotope thermoelectric generators, are expected to run out of power.
Source: The Sun
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2024-04-11 17:24:28
