NASA’s Voyager 1 team is trying to figure out why the spacecraft appears to be confused about its location in space, but the distance from Earth’s mission makes solving the problem difficult.
He Travel 1 mission launched in 1977 with a design life of five years. Nearly 45 years and a series of planetary overflights later, the spacecraft is now about 14.5 billion miles (23.3 billion kilometers) away. Earth, exploring interstellar space. The spacecraft has made countless discoveries, but it has also suffered a number of anomalies and mysteries. The last of these is junk telemetry data being sent to Earth.
“We have a problem with the Voyager 1 spacecraft,” said Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA’s associate administrator for the direction of the Science Mission, at a meeting of the Space Studies Board of the National Academies of Science, Engineering and Medicine on Thursday (June 9), where he offered more details about the situation and what it could mean for the mission.
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While the spacecraft is working well, the messages from Voyager’s articulation and attitude control system, which keeps the spacecraft and its antenna in the proper orientation, “do not reflect what is really happening on board.” said Zurbuchen.
Getting to the bottom of this confusion is not easy, however, due to the great distance between Earth and Voyager 1, which means long delays in the time it takes to communicate with Voyager 1, almost becoming the spacecraft in a victim of its longevity. “Imagine you have a conversation with someone in which you can only say one word every day,” Zurbuchen said. “And you only listen 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 continue forever. In addition to the current communications problem, Voyager 1 also operates at much colder temperatures than was designed due to the decay of the spacecraft’s nuclear power source.
“I’m not telling you it’s the end of this mission,” he said, noting that the team behind the mission has made many mistakes about Voyager’s long life.
“Make no mistake, there were problems, even since I’ve been at NASA, that really worried about Voyager; the team has fixed it,” he said. “But also, if one day, it is no longer solved, it is an immediate success and we should take out the champagne.”
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