Voyager 1 is transmitting a torrent of nonsense from outside our solar system; NASA engineers figure out why.
The Voyager 1 spacecraft has been returning to Earth with unintelligible gibberish for the last five months. NASA engineers finally understand why today.
The spacecraft, which is 46 years old, regularly transmits radio signals as it moves away from our solar system. However, in November 2023, the signals abruptly got jumbled, making it impossible for scientists to interpret any of the data, leaving them puzzled as to the fault’s cause.
In order to obtain a readout from the flight data subsystem (FDS), which gathers Voyager 1’s scientific and engineering data before beaming it back to Earth, NASA engineers transmitted a command prompt, or “poke,” to the craft in March.
The engineers have identified the root of the issue: a damaged memory in the FDS. This was discovered after deciphering the spacecraft’s answer.
In a blog post published on Wednesday, March 13, NASA stated, “The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn’t working.” “Engineers can’t determine with certainty what caused the issue. Two possibilities are that the chip could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or that it simply may have worn out after 46 years.”
The developers claim they can find a way to operate the FDS without the damaged chip, even if it might take many months. This will allow the spacecraft to resume sending readable data from beyond our solar system and restore its message output.
Voyager 1, which was launched in 1977, swiftly passed Saturn and Jupiter in 1979 and 1980 before departing for interstellar space in 2012. It is now monitoring the environment outside the heliosphere, the solar system’s shield of magnetic protection provided by the sun.
Any radio communication from Voyager 1 to Earth takes 22.5 hours to travel, as the spacecraft is currently located over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away from our planet.
