Voyager 1 One of two space probes that NASA launched in 1977 to study Jupiter, Saturn and their moons is sending confusing data back to Earth, according to the space agency. The spacecraft’s control system regularly sends telemetry data to NASA indicating its location. But the engineering team at Voyager 1 was recently baffled by readings from the spacecraft containing mixed or inaccurate data. Even more baffling, the 45-year-old probe is otherwise in good shape – its signal is still strong and the glitch hasn’t triggered safe mode. Voyager 2 (Voyager 1’s investigation sister) looks just as good.
“A puzzle like this is a bit like the course at this point in the Voyager mission,” said Susan Dodd, Voyager project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory. “The spacecraft is approximately 45 years old, which is far beyond what mission planners expected. We’re also in interstellar space – a highly radioactive environment where no spacecraft has flown before. So there are some big challenges for the engineering team.”
Communicating with Voyager 1 is easier said than done. Both probes are now further away from Earth than Pluto – Voyager 1 is an estimated coil 14.5 billion miles from our planet. It takes approximately two days to receive a response from the spacecraft after sending a message, according to NASA.
Dodd said NASA may be able to fix the problem through software changes or one of the spacecraft’s redundant hardware systems. If not, the agency will have to “adapt” to this flaw.
Either way, NASA will lose contact with both drones in the next few years when their power supplies run out. Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 run on plutonium-238, which decays over time. Scientists estimate that by 2025, neither of the probes will have enough plutonium-238 to keep functioning properly. There is a limited supply of plutonium remaining on Earth, and producing it is time-consuming and challenging. For many years, Russia supplied NASA with plutonium-238, until then cutting that agreement in 2015. Fortunately for NASA, the US Department of Energy is reproducing domestic plutonium-238 at Oak Ridge Laboratory, making a number of current and future NASA missions possible — including NASA’s Perseverance Rover.
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