This is the best summary I could come up with:
The last time Stamatios “Tom” Krimigis saw the Voyager 1 space probe in person, it was the summer of 1977, just before it launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.
“It basically stopped talking to us in a coherent manner,” says Suzanne Dodd of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who has been the project manager for the Voyager interstellar mission since 2010.
So to try to fix Voyager 1’s current woes, the dozen or so people on Dodd’s team have had to pore over yellowed documents and old mimeographs.
“They’re doing a lot of work to try and get into the heads of the original developers and figure out why they designed something the way they did and what we could possibly try that might give us some answers to what’s going wrong with the spacecraft,” says Dodd.
Linda Spilker, who serves as the Voyager mission’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says that when she comes to work she sees "all of these circuit diagrams up on the wall with sticky notes attached.
Mission managers have turned off heaters and taken other measures to conserve power and extend the Voyager probes’ lifespan.
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It’s going to be like that Star Trek episode where they find Voyager and it’s evolved and achieved sentience.
Crazy that after all this time we can still communicate with Voyager 1. Even though it is babbling back now.
That’s actually not all that hard. They just have to blast it with a radio signal strong enough from Earth for it to hear and they have to have really big dishes on earth in order to hear it.
As an electrical engineer who dabbled in RF in school, that sounds supremely difficult.
Yeah, it’s most definitely not easy. Thankfully though, high frequency devices like that are very small wavelengths and therefore gain can be achieved with decently small antennas. The higher the frequency, the shorter the wavelength, and the shorter the wavelength, the smaller the antenna needed to receive it. Or a big antenna can hear it from further away, since it has a big collection area.
Is it possible that cosmic rays beyond the heliopause have damaged (bit-flipped) the radiation-hardened circuitry on board the spacecraft? That might cause it to start jibbering nonsense.
That’s very likely what happened. The problem is that the control board that manages communications is so old that nobody can find any documentation on how it works, so they can’t even begin to figure out a fix.
Everyone involved with that project is also probably dead.
Everyone involved with that project is also probably dead.
Literally, the FIRST sentence of the article is talking about someone who’s been involved with Voyager I from the start. Yes, the project has outlasted many of it’s original engineers, but to say, “Everyone involved with that project is also probably dead,” for a major mission that launched 46 years ago is obviously untrue.
There are a number of possibilities. We likely will never know what actually happened. A bit flip would be bad, but potentially fixable. If they can somehow force a reset. It could also be simple component failure, a bad capacitor, in the wrong place, and your computer goes haywire. Ditto for mechanical damage. A grain of dust, hitting the wrong point could cause a cascade of problems.
The backup systems are long dead. The fact they’ve managed to extend the mission life by 41 years is quite incredible. It was never expected to last this long.
God speed V’ger!
Voyager 1 is almost one light day away, and now my brain hurts thinking about it.
1 light year = 63241.077 AU (distance between Sun and Earth)
Distance of Voyager 1 from Earth: ~162.84 AU
Not even close.
Sources:
Makes me miss the old sub /r/ConfidentlyIncorrect. I need to see if that exists on Lemmy anywhere.
Edit: Sure does: !confidently_incorrect@lemmy.world
I’m pretty sure I read light year initially. Maybe OP modified their comment?
I could’ve have misread it also. 🤷♂️
Aaannnd I get to post this https://m.xkcd.com/2897/
Would you say it is about 1/365th the the distance of a light year? I wonder if there is a term for that…
