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For the past five month , the Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending a unbendable stream of unreadable gibberish back to Earth . Now , NASAengineers finally have a go at it why .
The 46 - year - honest-to-god space vehicle sends regular radio signals as it drifts further from oursolar organization . But in November 2023 , the signals suddenly became garbled , meaning scientists were unable to scan any of its data point , and they were left bewilder about the fault ’s origins .
An artist’s illustration of Voyager 1 with its antenna pointed back at Earth.
In March , NASA engineers post a command prompt , or " poke , " to the craft to get a read-out from its flight information subsystem ( FDS ) — which packages Voyager 1 ’s science and engineering data before beam it back to Earth .
After decoding the spacecraft ’s response , the technologist have found the source of the problem : The FDS ’s retentivity has been corrupted .
Related : NASA ’s Voyager 1 sends readable message to Earth after 4 nail - mordacious calendar month of gibberish
" The squad suspects that a single chip responsible for for stash away part of the affected serving of the FDS memory is n’t working , " NASA said in a blog postWednesday ( March 13 ) . " Engineers ca n’t check with certainty what make the issue . Two possibility are that the chip could have been hit by an up-and-coming particle from space or that it simply may have put on out after 46 year . "
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Although it may take several month , the locomotive engineer say they can discover a workaround to play the FDS without the fry chip — fix the space vehicle ’s message output signal and enable it to continue to station clear info from outside our solar scheme .
Launched in 1977 , Voyager 1 speed past Saturn and Jupiter in 1979 and 1980 before flying out into interstellar blank space in 2012 . It is now recording the conditions outside of the Lord’s Day ’s protective magnetic theatre , or heliosphere , which blanket our solar system of rules .
Voyager 1 is currently more than 15 billion miles ( 24 billion kilometers ) from Earth , and it carry 22.5 hours for any radio signal to travel from the cunning to our planet .
