Space: Voyager 1 is no longer responding

A headache for NASA. The US space agency can no longer communicate properly with Voyager 1, its oldest and most distant probe sailing outside the solar system.

Voyager 1 has been developing in space for 46 years with its twin, Voyager 2. They are… The two oldest spacecraft date. Voyager 1 is the farthest probe. It sails more than 24 billion kilometers from Earth, and thus outside our solar system. But for several days, NASA was no longer receiving the scientific data that the probe normally sends back. Instead, teams receive a kind of error message, in binary language, a kind of repetitive chatter based on 0’s and 1’s. It appears to be a computer error on one of the team’s computers.

The failure is alarming because this probe is very valuable, being the farthest man-made object from Earth. In the space of 46 years, thanks to the camera and its instruments for studying cosmic rays, magnetic fields, radio signals, or the composition of certain surfaces, it has made possible many new and integrated observations of everything we have known so far, such as those of the rings of Jupiter or Saturn, or the composition of Titan’s atmosphere, Or even one of the most distant views of our planet, an image in which the Earth is just a small pale blue dot.

To try to solve the problem, scientists actually tried turning the system on and off remotely, but they did not succeed. This is a major technical and technological challenge because, given the age of the spacecraft, NASA technicians must delve into the technological knowledge of the late 1970s and refer to the original design documents for the probe, which are several decades old. Above all, you should not send a request that could permanently damage the system. And all this takes into account distances, because requests sent from Earth take 22.5 hours to reach the probe and you have to wait 45 hours to get a response.

This is not the first time that transmission problems have arisen between the Voyager and NASA probes, but so far the malfunctions have been resolved. This time again, scientists hope to meet this challenge because Voyager is usually able to transmit data until 2025.