NASA’s Voyager 1 team is trying to figure out why the spacecraft is confused about its position in space, but the mission’s distance from Earth makes solving the problem difficult.
That traveler 1 The mission was launched in 1977 with a lifespan of five years. After nearly 45 years and a number of planetary flybys later, the spacecraft is now about 14.5 billion miles (23.3 billion kilometers) away a country, interstellar space exploration. The spaceship has made countless discoveries, but has also suffered from a number of anomalies and mysteries. The last of these is Send unsolicited telemetry data to Earth.
“We have a problem with the Voyager 1 spacecraft,” Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, said at a meeting of the Space Studies Council of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering, and Medicine on Thursday (June 9). . Check out more details on the situation and what it could mean for the mission.
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While the spacecraft is performing well, Zurbuchen said, messages from the Voyager hinge and control system that keeps the spacecraft and its antenna in the proper orientation “do not reflect what is actually happening on board.”
Getting to the bottom of this confusion is not easy given the great distance between Earth and Voyager 1, resulting in long delays in contacting Voyager 1, almost making the spacecraft a victim of its longevity. “Imagine having a conversation with someone where you can only say one word a day,” Zurbuchen said. “You only hear once every two days. That’s the kind of discussion we have.”
Zurbuchen is confident that the Voyager team will solve the mystery, but noted that the spacecraft cannot last forever. In addition to the current communications problems, Voyager 1 is also operating in temperatures much cooler than originally intended due to the decay of the spacecraft’s nuclear power source.
“I’m not telling you it’s the end of this mission,” he insisted, noting that the team behind the mission had addressed many of the loopholes related to Voyager’s long life.
“Make no mistake, there were issues that had really worried me about Voyager since my days at NASA; the team solved them,” he said. “But even if the problem isn’t solved one day, that’s an instant success and we should throw the champagne away.”
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