NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has suffered yet another communication malfunction.
Voyager 1 was the first spacecraft to cross the heliosphere and is currently the most distant human-made object from Earth.
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It was launched from Cape Canaveral along with Voyager 2 in 1977 as part of Nasa’s mission to explore Jupiter and Saturn.
Currently, the probe is around 15 billion miles from Earth and has been active for 4.5 decades.
However, the probe has gone dark due to a malfunction and has not been able to transmit data since November 14.
Nasa engineers are now growing concerned and say there’s a chance that the spacecraft may not recover.
“It would be the biggest miracle if we get it back,” Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd said in an interview with Ars Technica.
The space agency did mention that the probe appears to be receiving and executing commands.
However, without the craft sending any data back, it’s difficult for engineers to assess the problem.
This is only made more complicated by the probe’s age and extreme distance from Earth.
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To attempt to tackle the problem, scientists have been sending commands to the probe.
Each message takes around 22 hours to send, and once it’s received by the probe, it can take days to get a response back.
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To make matters worse, much of the probe’s instructions are not digitized.
“The people that built the spacecraft are not alive anymore,” Dodd said.
“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.
This isn’t the first time that Voyager 1 has had communication issues – a few months ago it was spewing strange binary data.
In computer-speak, binary data describes a certain line of current in an electrical circuit being on (1) or off (0).
And then in May 2022, the probe sent back data about its location and orientation in space that conflicted with what Nasa knew about its position.
“A mystery like this is sort of par for the course at this stage of the Voyager mission,” Dodd said at the time.
This post first appeared on Thesun.co.uk
