NASA’s longest-running interstellar overachiever, Voyager 1, has given its handlers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory something new to worry about. After four and a half decades of dutifully phoning home from billions of miles away, the spacecraft has apparently decided to play hard to get. Communications from Voyager 1 have turned into a stream of information that, while technically being transmitted, makes about as much sense as a cat walking across a keyboard.
Engineers noticed in November that the data from the spacecraft’s flight data system was essentially unreadable. Not because of a technical glitch at ground control, but likely due to a bungle within the aging probe’s own communication system. The team suspects the culprit is the unwieldy-sounding Flight Data Subsystem, which if you are wondering is essentially the digital brain that formats Voyager’s thoughts into something Earth can understand.
Now before anyone jumps to the conclusion that alien life is uploading memes into NASA’s data stream, the scientists believe it is more mundane. It is quite possibly a malfunctioning chip that has corrupted some of the system’s memory. In other words, Voyager 1, now some 15 billion miles away and huddled in the cold vacuum of interstellar space, might simply be experiencing the space equivalent of forgetting where it put its car keys. Except the car is a $250 million spacecraft and the keys are the guidance system.
The spacecraft, to be clear, is still alive and transmitting. It just no longer appears to be saying anything intelligible. Mission engineers are currently working on decoding the gibberish in the hopes of sending along a fix, though doing so requires a round trip signal time of nearly two days, which does rather slow down the IT support.
Launched in 1977 with a golden record and practical dreams of interstellar networking, Voyager 1 has lasted far longer than anyone at NASA reasonably predicted, even as it continues to meander into the unknown. And while the data problem is no small hiccup, the team remains cautiously hopeful they can coax the spacecraft back into conversation.
Because even in space, sometimes you just need to turn it off and on again.