It’s been several months since one of humanity’s most accomplished spacecraft, the Voyager 1 probe, stopped talking to us — and while they remain somewhat hopeful, Voyager mission scientists are preparing for the worst: a farewell.
“Sad and frustrated to see the spacecraft still operating, but muted,” Bruce Waggoner, the Voyager mission assurance manager, told Space.com of the group’s current morale. ‘Even though we know the end could come at any moment, it’s never easy to lose a spacecraft. Especially not something like Traveler 1.”
For more than 45 years, this boxy machine with a pearly white, conical disk that makes it look like a giant speaker in space has been sending back stunning data. And I mean stunning. It’s not just the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space room (and thus the furthest man-made object ever), but is also responsible for the identification of new Jupiter moons, the discovery of yet another Saturn ring and the solar system‘s first and only ‘family portrait’ featuring our eclectic gang of planets.
Related: NASA’s interstellar Voyager 1 spacecraft isn’t doing so well — here’s what we know
That is also why we have the powerful Light blue dot image that pops up every now and then on the internet to remind us of our insignificance, or rather, significance, depending on your perspective. If Carl Sagan famously said, “Look at that dot again. That’s here. That’s home. That’s us.”
All the while, Voyager 1’s cosmic letters have come through as computer messages often do, with zeros and ones in precise patterns. With a little manual work, such sequences can be translated into words the human mind can understand – and scientists were always excited to open a new package of Voyager 1’s binary code.
But then, last September, the zeros and the ones do not feel like it anymore.
“Effective is the call between the spacecraft and the Soil was still connected, but Voyager’s ‘voice’ was replaced by a monotone dial tone,” the engineering team told Space.com.
Issues with Voyager 1 have occurred before, such as in 2022 when the probe’s “posture articulation and control system” had some complications, but this one appears to be a doozy. The team has still not been able to solve the problem, even months after the problem came to light, and is still looking for the root of the problem.
That’s how it is time to close the final curtain on Voyager 1?
Well, on that note, scientists aren’t quite sure yet. They continue to work to remedy the situation – and very diligently. “The team is tired because we have been maintaining a brisk pace for three months now, but we keep going because we have ideas and we have hope,” Voyager mission engineer Kareem Badaruddin told Space.com.
But what the team is What is certain is that even if Voyager 1 succumbs to its injuries, the journey is certainly not over.
“Do not forget it Traveler 2 still going strong! If we can keep one spacecraft going, the mission will continue,” the crew said.
Voyager 2, which actually looks a lot like Voyager 1 launched 16 days before its counterpart, on August 20, 1977. Voyager 1 happened to travel faster because it had a more efficient route out of the sky. asteroid belt, officially overtaking his partner on December 15, 1977 and later became the first probe to leave the gravitational influence of our solar system. However, Voyager 2 does have a number of achievements to its credit, including the fact that it remains the only spacecraft to have visited the outer planets. Uranus And Neptune.
Together, the Voyagers’ shared mission was to simply explore: to plunge through the solar system, to traverse moons and planets beyond our own, and to attempt to go where no spacecraft has gone before.
‘The Voyagers are the only spacecraft that does research interstellar space in-situ, and there are no missions that can collect the same data remotely,” the team said.
They certainly did their duty and hopefully Voyager 1 still has some energy left. But even if that’s not the case, scientists want to make it clear that Voyager 2 will continue to keep the torch burning.
Voyager 1’s medical chart
In December 2023, the Voyager 1 team announced that the spacecraft’s malfunction is due to the Flight Data System, or FDS, one of the onboard computers. There used to be a backup FDS, but it stopped working in 1981.
“Because of this issue, scientists are not receiving scientific data or updates on the health and status of the probe, including information that could reveal the cause of the problem,” the team explains.
This is where perhaps the biggest problem with this dilemma arises. One of the main roles of the FDS is to basically keep Voyager 1’s medical records up to date and then work with what’s known as the telemetry modulation unit, or TMU, to tell ground control what’s going on the hand is. going on. But because the FDS itself is the one that is malfunctioning, the transfer of medical records cannot take place.
“The team tried several ‘simple’ solutions, such as resetting the FDS to the state it was in before the problem started,” the engineers said. “This week, the team will send more commands to the spacecraft to gather information about the status of the onboard systems. In the coming weeks, the team expects to make more aggressive efforts to reset various systems that could be affecting the FDS.”
At this time, the team believes that a possible cause of the problem has to do with the FDS’s memory being corrupted by a mechanism that causes the binary code to create unintelligible patterns. However, engineers are also considering that it could be a physical hardware fault. After all, Voyager 1’s mechanics have been toiling for decades. Something may simply have broken, hardware or software. Scientists even sent some preventative software patches to both Voyagers last year, from billions of miles away.
“The anomaly has made us study and learn from the spacecraft – a lot of knowledge that was forgotten because it wasn’t needed for years has been recovered,” Badaruddin said.
In a slightly more far-fetched scenario, the team also suggests that it is possible that some kind of energetic particle could have impacted the spacecraft. If that were to happen, a so-called ‘bit flip’ could occur, meaning a 0 in the code accidentally became a 1, or vice versa.
Still, the team leaves all possibilities open. That’s because in reality it may not even be the FDS that’s causing problems. This theory is the most likely theory to emerge from the data currently available to engineers. “Because no technical data is coming back, it is very difficult to isolate the source of the problem,” they said.
Plus, on a bit of a non-silver lining, remember that Voyager 1’s greatest achievement is being the very first probe to venture into interstellar space, where it is surrounded by pristine stardust and blankets of darkness? Yes that is it extremely far away from us. And that means that communication with it takes a very (very) long time. Specifically, at the time of writing this article, Voyager 1 is more than 162 AUs from Earth; one AU is equal to the distance between our planet and the sun. In total, it takes about 45 hours to execute one round-trip command with this spacecraft. So “this process could take months,” the team said.
To give you a silver lining, the scientists have confirmed that Voyager 1 exhibits a so-called carrier tone, which runs along a wavelength that carries no information, but rather acts like a heartbeat. At least we know it’s alive.
“Other than the current problem, the spacecraft appears to be healthy. So if we can solve this, Voyager 1 should be able to continue its science mission,” the team said. “But the Voyagers are already operating far, far beyond what anyone expected of them. We know that the more time that passes, the more problems are likely to arise. We will keep them going as long as possible, but we know they won’t last forever.”
Related stories:
— Voyager 2: An iconic spacecraft that is still exploring 45 years later
— NASA’s interstellar Voyager probes get software updates broadcast from 12 billion miles away
– NASA Voyager 2 spacecraft extends its interstellar science mission for three more years
“If V1 didn’t make it? I would be very proud; the mission has far exceeded the designers’ expectations,” Badaruddin said. “But actually that’s hard to think about because we still believe we can recover.”
Sadly, our fingers are crossed that Voyager 1 returns to its healthy self – but even if it doesn’t and is left alone to float through space, we can rest assured that its legacy is already firmly entrenched in our books, in our hearts and in our history.
Then it’s up to you, Voyager 2.