Voyager 1 Just Activated a Radio That’s Been Offline Since 1981
Last month, NASA briefly lost Voyager 1 in the expanse of interstellar space, and when the craft reappeared it was communicating with a transmitter it hasn’t used in more than 40 years
The trouble began on October 16, when NASA beamed a command to Voyager 1 to turn on one of its heaters. An innocent enough request, but the spacecraft responded by ghosting Earth.
It actually took the agency two full days to notice the issue.
That’s because Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object, and being almost 25 billion kilometers (15.3 billion miles) away, it takes nearly 23 hours for a message to get there – even at the speed of light – and another 23 hours for a response.
On October 18, Voyager 1 missed its scheduled return call. NASA’s Deep Space Network (DSN) scanned for the signal and eventually found it on a slightly different frequency band.
It seems that the heater triggered Voyager 1’s built-in fault protection system. If an instrument tries to draw too much power, this mechanism will automatically shut off other, non-essential systems to conserve energy.
In this case, the casualty was its X-band radio transmitter, the spacecraft’s main line of communication with Earth. To save power, the fault protection system had reduced the rate of data transmission, and changed the X-band signal.
DSN reestablished the connection, and things seemed stable while the flight team began investigating the issue. But the next day, comms cut out completely.
NASA’s suspicion is that the X-band transmitter had set off the fault protection system twice more, which would have caused the craft to turn it off completely. In its place, Voyager 1 would have switched to the S-band transmitter, which uses less power.
Unfortunately, it’s also far fainter, and the crew feared that it could no longer be detected from this far away. After all, Voyager 1 hasn’t used the S-band transmitter to talk to Earth since 1981, when it was obviously much, much closer to us.
Thankfully, DSN engineers were able to reconnect with this instrument, sending a command on October 22 that confirmed it’s still working. The team doesn’t want to turn the X-band transmitter back on before they can figure out what the problem is, but troubleshooting is ongoing. Hopefully, Voyager 1 will be returned to normal operations soon.
The most impressive part of the story is that it’s still possible to run these kinds of diagnostics from across the width of the solar system, on tech that’s almost 50 years old. Although, as they age, the Voyager probes are having more and more technical troubles.
In 2022, a glitch caused Voyager 1 to send back garbled telemetry data for a few months. And between November 2023 and June 2024, the probe sent back nothing but nonsense, which was eventually traced to a corrupted chip in its memory system.
It’s important to keep the two probes in working order, as they move through a region of space that no other human-made objects have yet experienced – interstellar space. There, beyond the Sun’s influence, the Voyager twins have made some intriguing discoveries.
Sadly, we might not have too much time left. Due to dwindling power supplies, it’s expected that they’ll stop collecting science data after 2025. By 2036, they’ll be out of range of the DSN, so we’ll likely lose track of them completely.
It might take them tens of thousands of years to exit the Oort Cloud, the icy structure that’s hypothesized to surround our solar system.
In about 40,000 years’ time, both Voyagers are expected to zip within two light-years of neighboring stars.
See more here sciencealert.com
Header image: Los Angeles Times
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Howdy
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How very star trek, in that no problem is terminal despite it’s vintage. There’s allways a solution when no solution is possible.
Power supply giving out then? Not able to supply power due to component failure?
“Divert power through the giggling pin and see it that causes the battery storage to improve”!
It’s an old piece of junk showing signs of it’s age. I find it hard to believe that despite the long intervals, and no hands-on capability, the thing can be fixed by ‘creative’ thinking.
Perhaps remotely improve the solar panel conversion efficiency to make up for it? I think not.
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Andy Rowlands
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The Voyagers have no batteries or solar panels, they are powered by radioisotopic thermoelectric generators, which basically use radioactive decay from small spheres of plutonium 238 to produce electricity. After 47 years, these generators are coming to the end of their capacity to produce electricity, and it is expected they will be unable to power their transmitters in about three or four years.
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Herb Rose
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Hi Andy,
The rate of radioactive decay is assumed to be constant. We will soon find out if this is true or if it is effected by the fields around it. The divergence of atomic clocks on satellites indicate to me that it is not constant.
Herb
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Howdy
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Still a dwindling power supply with age of components playing a part. My two examples are merely to demonstrate the ludicrous creative thinking that can fix it if it’s ‘out there’ enough, and is reminiscent of Scotty finding the answer to any dilemma, no matter how convoluted. It’s not the first time for voyager.
Difference is, on such a vehicle as a ‘starship’ would be, redundancy and multi-function modular systems would be the norm, though still not on such a far reaching scale as Scotty manages to configure methinks.
All NASA knows, It went missing, so perhaps was seized by extra-terrestrials, then brought back online under a different configuration to lend credence to the change, and may be being used to observe reactions. NASA would easily fall prey to such a thing as they think in a linear fashion.
Or it exists only as a ‘virtual machine’ and is just a copy, again for monitoring behaviour.
Too ridiculous? Unless one is closed-minded, this is a distinct possibility that must be kept in mind. Humanity is not the supreme intelligence of the universe.
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Tom
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Perhaps one day, one of these crafts will return to earth as V’Ger and find a human-less world.
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Aaron
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Cool, more nasa cartoons
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Joe
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Complete BULLSHIT! Everything NASA says is a LIE!
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Lloyd
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Chill Pill Time! Take a deep breath…
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Andy Rowlands
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Well said Lloyd.
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