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Hope returns —

Nasa knows what knocked voyager 1 offline, but it will take a while to fix, "engineers are optimistic they can find a way for the fds to operate normally.".

Stephen Clark - Apr 6, 2024 12:28 am UTC

Engineers have determined why NASA's Voyager 1 probe has been transmitting gibberish for nearly five months, raising hopes of recovering humanity's most distant spacecraft.

Voyager 1, traveling outbound some 15 billion miles (24 billion km) from Earth, started beaming unreadable data down to ground controllers on November 14. For nearly four months, NASA knew Voyager 1 was still alive—it continued to broadcast a steady signal—but could not decipher anything it was saying.

Confirming their hypothesis, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California confirmed a small portion of corrupted memory caused the problem. The faulty memory bank is located in Voyager 1's Flight Data System (FDS), one of three computers on the spacecraft. The FDS operates alongside a command-and-control central computer and another device overseeing attitude control and pointing.

The FDS duties include packaging Voyager 1's science and engineering data for relay to Earth through the craft's Telemetry Modulation Unit and radio transmitter. According to NASA, about 3 percent of the FDS memory has been corrupted, preventing the computer from carrying out normal operations.

Optimism growing

Suzanne Dodd, NASA's project manager for the twin Voyager probes, told Ars in February that this was one of the most serious problems the mission has ever faced. That is saying something because Voyager 1 and 2 are NASA's longest-lived spacecraft. They launched 16 days apart in 1977, and after flying by Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 is flying farther from Earth than any spacecraft in history. Voyager 2 is trailing Voyager 1 by about 2.5 billion miles, although the probes are heading out of the Solar System in different directions.

Normally, engineers would try to diagnose a spacecraft malfunction by analyzing data it sent back to Earth. They couldn't do that in this case because Voyager 1 has been transmitting data packages manifesting a repeating pattern of ones and zeros. Still, Voyager 1's ground team identified the FDS as the likely source of the problem.

The Flight Data Subsystem was an innovation in computing when it was developed five decades ago. It was the first computer on a spacecraft to use volatile memory. Most of NASA's missions operate with redundancy, so each Voyager spacecraft launched with two FDS computers. But the backup FDS on Voyager 1 failed in 1982.

Due to the Voyagers' age, engineers had to reference paper documents, memos, and blueprints to help understand the spacecraft's design details. After months of brainstorming and planning, teams at JPL uplinked a command in early March to prompt the spacecraft to send back a readout of the FDS memory.

The command worked, and Voyager1 responded with a signal different from the code it had been transmitting since November. After several weeks of meticulous examination of the new code, engineers pinpointed the location of the bad memory.

"The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn’t working," NASA said in an update posted Thursday. "Engineers can’t determine with certainty what caused the issue. Two possibilities are that the chip could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or that it simply may have worn out after 46 years."

Voyager 1's distance from Earth complicates the troubleshooting effort. The one-way travel time for a radio signal to reach Voyager 1 from Earth is about 22.5 hours, meaning it takes roughly 45 hours for engineers on the ground to learn how the spacecraft responded to their commands.

NASA also must use its largest communications antennas to contact Voyager 1. These 230-foot-diameter (70-meter) antennas are in high demand by many other NASA spacecraft , so the Voyager team has to compete with other missions to secure time for troubleshooting. This means it will take time to get Voyager 1 back to normal operations.

"Although it may take weeks or months, engineers are optimistic they can find a way for the FDS to operate normally without the unusable memory hardware, which would enable Voyager 1 to begin returning science and engineering data again," NASA said.

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After a 12.3-billion-mile 'shout,' NASA regains full contact with Voyager 2

Emily Olson

Ayana Archie

A NASA image of one of the twin Voyager space probes. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory lost contact with Voyager 2 on July 21 after mistakenly pointing its antenna 2 degrees away from Earth. On Friday, contact was fully restored. NASA/Getty Images hide caption

A NASA image of one of the twin Voyager space probes. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory lost contact with Voyager 2 on July 21 after mistakenly pointing its antenna 2 degrees away from Earth. On Friday, contact was fully restored.

Talk about a long-distance call.

NASA said it resumed full communications with the Voyager 2 on Friday after almost two weeks of silence from the interstellar spacecraft.

The agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said a series of ground antennas, part of the Deep Space Network, registered a carrier signal from Voyager 2 on Tuesday. However, the signal was too faint.

A Deep Space Network facility in Australia then sent "the equivalent of an interstellar 'shout' " to the Voyager 2 telling it to turn its antenna back toward Earth. The signal was sent more than 12.3 billion miles away and it took 37 hours to get a response from the spacecraft, NASA said.

Scientists received a response at about 12:30 a.m. ET Friday. Voyager 2 is now operating normally, returning science and telemetry data, and "remains on its expected trajectory," NASA said.

NASA said Friday that it lost contact with Voyager 2 on July 21 after "a series of planned commands" inadvertently caused the craft to turn its antenna 2 degrees away from the direction of its home planet.

NASA is keeping Voyager 2 going until at least 2026 by tapping into backup power

What might seem like a slight error had big consequences: NASA previously said it wouldn't be able to communicate with the craft until October, when the satellite would go through one of its routine repositioning steps.

"That is a long time to wait, so we'll try sending up commands several times" before October, program manager Suzanne Dodd told The Associated Press.

These are the 4 astronauts who'll take a trip around the moon next year

Even if Voyager 2 had failed to reestablish communications until fall, the engineers expected it to stay moving on its planned trajectory on the edge of the solar system.

Voyager 2 entered interstellar space in November 2018 — more than 40 years since it launched from Cape Canaveral, Fla. To this day, Voyager 2 remains one of only two human-made objects to ever operate outside the heliosphere, which NASA defines as "the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields generated by the Sun."

Its primary mission was to study the outer solar system, and already, Voyager 2 has proved its status as a planetary pioneer . Equipped with several imaging instruments, the spacecraft is credited with documenting the discovery of 16 new moons, six new rings and Neptune's "Great Dark Spot."

Voyager 2 Bids Adieu To The Heliosphere, Entering Interstellar Space

Voyager 2 is also carrying some precious cargo, like a message in a bottle, should it find itself as the subject of another world's discovery: a golden record containing a variety of natural sounds, greetings in 55 languages and a 90-minute selection of music.

Last month's command mix-up foreshadows the craft's inevitable end an estimated three years from now.

"Eventually, there will not be enough electricity to power even one instrument," reads a NASA page documenting the spacecraft's travels . "Then, Voyager 2 will silently continue its eternal journey among the stars."

Meanwhile, Voyager 2's sister spacecraft, Voyager 1, is still broadcasting and transmitting data just fine from a slightly farther vantage point of 15 billion miles away.

Correction Aug. 3, 2023

A previous version of this article implied that Voyager 2 flew past Uranus in 2018 when, in fact, the spacecraft concluded its encounter with the planet and started heading toward Neptune in 1986. Voyager 2 entered interstellar space in November 2018.

• Jet Propulsion Laboratory

NASA’s Voyager Will Do More Science With New Power Strategy

Editor’s note: Language was added in the second paragraph on May 1 to underscore that the mission will continue even after a science instrument is retired.

The plan will keep Voyager 2’s science instruments turned on a few years longer than previously anticipated, enabling yet more revelations from interstellar space.

The Voyager proof test model, shown in a space simulator chamber at JPL in 1976, was a replica of the twin Voyager space probes that launched in 1977. The model’s scan platform stretches to the right, holding several of the spacecraft’s science instruments in their deployed positions.

Launched in 1977, the Voyager 2 spacecraft is more than 12 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) from Earth, using five science instruments to study interstellar space. To help keep those instruments operating despite a diminishing power supply, the aging spacecraft has begun using a small reservoir of backup power set aside as part of an onboard safety mechanism. The move will enable the mission to postpone shutting down a science instrument until 2026, rather than this year.

Switching off a science instrument will not end the mission. After shutting off the one instrument in 2026, the probe will continue to operate four science instruments until the declining power supply requires another to be turned off. If Voyager 2 remains healthy, the engineering team anticipates the mission could potentially continue for years to come.

Voyager 2 and its twin Voyager 1 are the only spacecraft ever to operate outside the heliosphere, the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields generated by the Sun. The probes are helping scientists answer questions about the shape of the heliosphere and its role in protecting Earth from the energetic particles and other radiation found in the interstellar environment.

“The science data that the Voyagers are returning gets more valuable the farther away from the Sun they go, so we are definitely interested in keeping as many science instruments operating as long as possible,” said Linda Spilker, Voyager’s project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California, which manages the mission for NASA.

Power to the Probes

Both Voyager probes power themselves with radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), which convert heat from decaying plutonium into electricity. The continual decay process means the generator produces slightly less power each year. So far, the declining power supply hasn’t impacted the mission’s science output, but to compensate for the loss, engineers have turned off heaters and other systems that are not essential to keeping the spacecraft flying.

Each of NASA’s Voyager probes are equipped with three radioisotope thermoelectric generators (RTGs), including the one shown here. The RTGs provide power for the spacecraft by converting the heat generated by the decay of plutonium-238 into electricity.

With those options now exhausted on Voyager 2, one of the spacecraft’s five science instruments was next on their list. (Voyager 1 is operating one less science instrument than its twin because an instrument failed early in the mission. As a result, the decision about whether to turn off an instrument on Voyager 1 won’t come until sometime next year.)

In search of a way to avoid shutting down a Voyager 2 science instrument, the team took a closer look at a safety mechanism designed to protect the instruments in case the spacecraft’s voltage – the flow of electricity – changes significantly. Because a fluctuation in voltage could damage the instruments, Voyager is equipped with a voltage regulator that triggers a backup circuit in such an event. The circuit can access a small amount of power from the RTG that’s set aside for this purpose. Instead of reserving that power, the mission will now be using it to keep the science instruments operating.

Although the spacecraft’s voltage will not be tightly regulated as a result, even after more than 45 years in flight, the electrical systems on both probes remain relatively stable, minimizing the need for a safety net. The engineering team is also able to monitor the voltage and respond if it fluctuates too much. If the new approach works well for Voyager 2, the team may implement it on Voyager 1 as well.

Get the Latest JPL News

“Variable voltages pose a risk to the instruments, but we’ve determined that it’s a small risk, and the alternative offers a big reward of being able to keep the science instruments turned on longer,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager’s project manager at JPL. “We’ve been monitoring the spacecraft for a few weeks, and it seems like this new approach is working.”

The Voyager mission was originally scheduled to last only four years, sending both probes past Saturn and Jupiter. NASA extended the mission so that Voyager 2 could visit Neptune and Uranus; it is still the only spacecraft ever to have encountered the ice giants. In 1990, NASA extended the mission again, this time with the goal of sending the probes outside the heliosphere. Voyager 1 reached the boundary in 2012, while Voyager 2 (traveling slower and in a different direction than its twin) reached it in 2018.

More About the Mission

A division of Caltech in Pasadena, JPL built and operates the Voyager spacecraft. The Voyager missions are a part of the NASA Heliophysics System Observatory, sponsored by the Heliophysics Division of the Science Mission Directorate in Washington.

For more information about the Voyager spacecraft, visit:

https://www.nasa.gov/voyager

News Media Contact

Calla Cofield

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

626-808-2469

[email protected]

• The Contents
• The Making of
• Where Are They Now
• Frequently Asked Questions
• Q & A with Ed Stone

golden record

Where are they now.

• frequently asked questions
• Q&A with Ed Stone

NASA’s Voyager Team Focuses on Software Patch, Thrusters

NASA Mission Update: Voyager 2 Communications Pause

NASA's Voyager Will Do More Science With New Power Strategy

Edward Stone Retires After 50 Years as NASA Voyager's Project Scientist

Voyager, NASA's Longest-Lived Mission, Logs 45 Years in Space

Voyager 1 distance from earth, voyager 1 distance from sun, voyager 1 one-way light time, voyager 1 cosmic ray data, voyager 2 distance from the earth, voyager 2 distance from the sun, voyager 2 one-way light time, voyager 2 cosmic ray data, what's happening now.

Since November 2023, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending a steady radio signal to Earth, but the signal does not contain usable data.

Engineers are working to resolve an issue with one of Voyager 1’s three onboard computers, called the flight data system (FDS).

The efforts should help extend the lifetimes of the agency's interstellar explorers.

Download the Voyager 40th Anniversary posters.

Posted Feb 17, 2024

At 3:22 PM UTC

NASA engineers told Space that “effectively, the call between the spacecraft and the Earth was still connected” after its transmissions stopped making sense last year, “but Voyager’s ‘voice’ was replaced with a monotonous dial tone.”

The scientists are reportedly holding out hope they can fix it, but if they aren’t able to, that would leave Voyager 2 as humanity’s only still-communicating spacecraft in interstellar space .

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NASA hopes to get the Voyager spacecraft to their 50th anniversary with clever engineering and difficult choices

• NASA's Voyager 1 and 2 are the only human-made objects to reach interstellar space.
• The two probes launched in 1977 and may soon lose communication with Earth.
• NASA hopes to stay in contact with the probes at least until their 50th anniversary in 2027.

In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 and 2 for what were meant to be four-year missions. For over 46 years, the pair have been delivering spectacular science far beyond what their first teams of researchers could have hoped.

From close-up views of Jupiter to a stunning look a Saturn's rings , the Voyager probes have helped shape our understanding of the solar system. Voyager 2 is still the only spacecraft to visit Uranus and Neptune . They've traveled farther from Earth than any other human-made object.

Solar wind streaming out from the sun and interstellar wind flowing back toward it creates a bubble known as the heliosphere. In 2012, Voyager 1 ventured beyond the heliosphere into interstellar space . Voyager 2 followed in 2018.

Both probes are slowly draining power and will soon lose contact with Earth.

But NASA is coming up with unique solutions to keep communicating with the two Voyagers.

"That's what's most important is keeping these spacecraft operating as long as possible," Suzanne Dodd , NASA's project manager for Voyager, told Business Insider.

Decades of data

Early in their travels, the two spacecraft parted ways. Voyager 1 is now 15 billion miles from Earth, and Voyager 2 is 12 billion.

As the probes journey farther from our planet, their data becomes more and more valuable. The Voyagers are picking up information on charged particles in interstellar space, including their energy levels, their abundance, and the direction of their magnetic fields.

"They're out of the effects of charged particles from our sun and truly measuring data in interstellar space and measuring how that data changes as they travel further away from us," Dodd said.

She compared it to seeing the difference between waves breaking on the shore and smoothing out deeper in the ocean.

"You would never know that unless you got further out of the ocean, how those waves change," she said.

It would take another 50 years for another vehicle to reach interstellar space, Dodd said. That's why the Voyagers are so valuable.

"They're doing very unique science," she said.

NASA has been turning instruments off to conserve power

The nuclear-powered Voyagers use radioisotope thermoelectric generators that turn heat from decaying plutonium-238 into energy. Originally, the generators provided about 450 watts of power, Dodd said.

Each year, as the plutonium decays, the generators produce about 4 watts less.

Related stories

"They're down to about 220 watts of power available," Dodd said.

Operating the probes' transmitters requires about 200 watts. Their instruments can use as much as 6 watts each.

Voyager 1 has four instruments running, and Voyager 2 has five.

To conserve power, engineers have shut off heaters and powered down other systems.

"We've done a lot of clever engineering things to be able to keep these instruments on as long as possible, knowing that we have a limited power supply," Dodd said.

"Something could fail that would be catastrophic kind of at any time," she added.

There have been a few near-misses, like when both probes almost failed at launch and when NASA lost communication with Voyager 2 for a few weeks in summer 2023.

By 2026, NASA may have to turn off at least one of Voyager 2's instruments.

"What we're looking at is making the two spacecraft complementary to each other," Dodd said. "You might keep one instrument operating on one spacecraft but turn it off on another."

Down the road, the choices about which instruments to keep running will be more difficult. Dodd said the scientists would likely keep powering the ones that took the least energy.

"And then it's also an evaluation of the science," she said. "What's the most critical science that we get?"

Even after the spacecraft power down, they have one more mission left

When the spacecraft lose communication with Earth, it will essentially be the end of the mission, Dodd said.

But the Voyagers will continue traveling, Dodd said, perhaps for hundreds of thousands of years.

"They'll just be floating out in space and floating around the center, traveling away from us with a gold record that, hopefully, some being, somewhere, will find in the future."

The golden records are phonographs containing images, words, and music meant to explain human life to aliens . Each Voyager probe has a copy.

In the meantime, Dodd isn't quite ready to say goodbye to the Voyagers.

"It's pretty remarkable, into our 47th year, just the whole record of discoveries it's made," she said.

The fact that there are two spacecraft means the chances are pretty good that at least one of them can keep communicating for a few more years, Dodd said.

"I'm very optimistic that we'll get to a 50-year anniversary," she said.

Watch: Animated map of the solar system shows just how far humans have explored space

• Main content

Engineers Pinpoint Cause of Voyager 1 Issue, Are Working on Solution

Engineers have confirmed that a small portion of corrupted memory in one of the computers aboard NASA’s Voyager 1 has been causing the spacecraft to send unreadable science and engineering data to Earth since last November. Called the flight data subsystem (FDS), the computer is responsible for packaging the probe’s science and engineering data before the telemetry modulation unit (TMU) and radio transmitter send the data to Earth.

In early March , the team issued a “poke” command to prompt the spacecraft to send back a readout of the FDS memory, which includes the computer’s software code as well as variables (values used in the code that can change based on commands or the spacecraft’s status). Using the readout, the team has confirmed that about 3% of the FDS memory has been corrupted, preventing the computer from carrying out normal operations.

The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn’t working. Engineers can’t determine with certainty what caused the issue. Two possibilities are that the chip could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or that it simply may have worn out after 46 years.

Although it may take weeks or months, engineers are optimistic they can find a way for the FDS to operate normally without the unusable memory hardware, which would enable Voyager 1 to begin returning science and engineering data again.

Launched in 1977 , the twin Voyager spacecraft flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune. They are both exploring interstellar space, outside the bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun, called the heliosphere. Voyager 2 continues to operate normally.

News Media Contact Calla Cofield Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 626-808-2469 [email protected]

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Voyager 1, First Craft in Interstellar Space, May Have Gone Dark

The 46-year-old probe, which flew by Jupiter and Saturn in its youth and inspired earthlings with images of the planet as a “Pale Blue Dot,” hasn’t sent usable data from interstellar space in months.

By Orlando Mayorquin

When Voyager 1 launched in 1977, scientists hoped it could do what it was built to do and take up-close images of Jupiter and Saturn. It did that — and much more.

Voyager 1 discovered active volcanoes, moons and planetary rings, proving along the way that Earth and all of humanity could be squished into a single pixel in a photograph, a “ pale blue dot, ” as the astronomer Carl Sagan called it. It stretched a four-year mission into the present day, embarking on the deepest journey ever into space.

Now, it may have bid its final farewell to that faraway dot.

Voyager 1 , the farthest man-made object in space, hasn’t sent coherent data to Earth since November. NASA has been trying to diagnose what the Voyager mission’s project manager, Suzanne Dodd, called the “most serious issue” the robotic probe has faced since she took the job in 2010.

The spacecraft encountered a glitch in one of its computers that has eliminated its ability to send engineering and science data back to Earth.

The loss of Voyager 1 would cap decades of scientific breakthroughs and signal the beginning of the end for a mission that has given shape to humanity’s most distant ambition and inspired generations to look to the skies.

“Scientifically, it’s a big loss,” Ms. Dodd said. “I think — emotionally — it’s maybe even a bigger loss.”

Voyager 1 is one half of the Voyager mission. It has a twin spacecraft, Voyager 2.

Launched in 1977, they were primarily built for a four-year trip to Jupiter and Saturn , expanding on earlier flybys by the Pioneer 10 and 11 probes.

The Voyager mission capitalized on a rare alignment of the outer planets — once every 175 years — allowing the probes to visit all four.

Using the gravity of each planet, the Voyager spacecraft could swing onto the next, according to NASA .

The mission to Jupiter and Saturn was a success.

The 1980s flybys yielded several new discoveries, including new insights about the so-called great red spot on Jupiter, the rings around Saturn and the many moons of each planet.

Voyager 2 also explored Uranus and Neptune , becoming in 1989 the only spacecraft to explore all four outer planets.

Voyager 1, meanwhile, had set a course for deep space, using its camera to photograph the planets it was leaving behind along the way. Voyager 2 would later begin its own trek into deep space.

“Anybody who is interested in space is interested in the things Voyager discovered about the outer planets and their moons,” said Kate Howells, the public education specialist at the Planetary Society, an organization co-founded by Dr. Sagan to promote space exploration.

“But I think the pale blue dot was one of those things that was sort of more poetic and touching,” she added.

On Valentine’s Day 1990, Voyager 1, darting 3.7 billion miles away from the sun toward the outer reaches of the solar system, turned around and snapped a photo of Earth that Dr. Sagan and others understood to be a humbling self-portrait of humanity.

“It’s known the world over, and it does connect humanity to the stars,” Ms. Dodd said of the mission.

She added: “I’ve had many, many many people come up to me and say: ‘Wow, I love Voyager. It’s what got me excited about space. It’s what got me thinking about our place here on Earth and what that means.’”

Ms. Howells, 35, counts herself among those people.

About 10 years ago, to celebrate the beginning of her space career, Ms. Howells spent her first paycheck from the Planetary Society to get a Voyager tattoo.

Though spacecraft “all kind of look the same,” she said, more people recognize the tattoo than she anticipated.

“I think that speaks to how famous Voyager is,” she said.

The Voyagers made their mark on popular culture , inspiring a highly intelligent “Voyager 6” in “Star Trek: The Motion Picture” and references on “The X Files” and “The West Wing.”

Even as more advanced probes were launched from Earth, Voyager 1 continued to reliably enrich our understanding of space.

In 2012, it became the first man-made object to exit the heliosphere, the space around the solar system directly influenced by the sun. There is a technical debate among scientists around whether Voyager 1 has actually left the solar system, but, nonetheless, it became interstellar — traversing the space between stars.

That charted a new path for heliophysics, which looks at how the sun influences the space around it. In 2018, Voyager 2 followed its twin between the stars.

Before Voyager 1, scientific data on the sun’s gases and material came only from within the heliosphere’s confines, according to Dr. Jamie Rankin, Voyager’s deputy project scientist.

“And so now we can for the first time kind of connect the inside-out view from the outside-in,” Dr. Rankin said, “That’s a big part of it,” she added. “But the other half is simply that a lot of this material can’t be measured any other way than sending a spacecraft out there.”

Voyager 1 and 2 are the only such spacecraft. Before it went offline, Voyager 1 had been studying an anomalous disturbance in the magnetic field and plasma particles in interstellar space.

“Nothing else is getting launched to go out there,” Ms. Dodd said. “So that’s why we’re spending the time and being careful about trying to recover this spacecraft — because the science is so valuable.”

But recovery means getting under the hood of an aging spacecraft more than 15 billion miles away, equipped with the technology of yesteryear. It takes 45 hours to exchange information with the craft.

It has been repeated over the years that a smartphone has hundreds of thousands of times Voyager 1’s memory — and that the radio transmitter emits as many watts as a refrigerator lightbulb.

“There was one analogy given that is it’s like trying to figure out where your cursor is on your laptop screen when your laptop screen doesn’t work,” Ms. Dodd said.

Her team is still holding out hope, she said, especially as the tantalizing 50th launch anniversary in 2027 approaches. Voyager 1 has survived glitches before, though none as serious.

Voyager 2 is still operational, but aging. It has faced its own technical difficulties too.

NASA had already estimated that the nuclear-powered generators of both spacecrafts would likely die around 2025.

Even if the Voyager interstellar mission is near its end, the voyage still has far to go.

Voyager 1 and its twin, each 40,000 years away from the next closest star, will arguably remain on an indefinite mission.

“If Voyager should sometime in its distant future encounter beings from some other civilization in space, it bears a message,” Dr. Sagan said in a 1980 interview .

Each spacecraft carries a gold-plated phonograph record loaded with an array of sound recordings and images representing humanity’s richness, its diverse cultures and life on Earth.

“A gift across the cosmic ocean from one island of civilization to another,” Dr. Sagan said.

Orlando Mayorquin is a general assignment and breaking news reporter based in New York. More about Orlando Mayorquin

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Voyager 1 and 2

The identical Voyager spacecraft are three-axis stabilized systems that use celestial or gyro referenced attitude control to maintain pointing of the high-gain antennas toward Earth. The prime mission science payload consisted of 10 instruments (11 investigations including radio science).

The command computer subsystem (CCS) provides sequencing and control functions The CCS contains fixed routines such as command decoding and fault detection and corrective routines, antenna pointing information, and spacecraft sequencing information.

The Attitude and Articulation Control Subsystem (AACS) controls spacecraft orientation, maintains the pointing of the high gain antenna towards Earth, controls attitude maneuvers, and positions the scan platform.

Uplink communications is via S-band (16-bits/sec command rate) while an X-band transmitter provides downlink telemetry at 160 bits/sec normally and 1.4 kbps for playback of high-rate plasma wave data. All data are transmitted from and received at the spacecraft via the 3.7 meter high-gain antenna (HGA).

Electrical power is supplied by three Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs). The current power levels are about 249 watts for each spacecraft. As the electrical power decreases, power loads on the spacecraft must be turned off in order to avoid having demand exceed supply. As loads are turned off, some spacecraft capabilities are eliminated.

Instruments

The prime mission science payload consisted of 10 instruments (11 investigations including radio science).

NASA listens for Voyager 2 spacecraft after wrong command cuts contact

CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. — NASA is listening for any peep from Voyager 2 after losing contact with the spacecraft billions of miles away.

Hurtling ever deeper into interstellar space, Voyager 2 has been out of touch ever since flight controllers accidentally sent a wrong command more than a week ago that tilted its antenna away from Earth. The spacecraft’s antenna shifted a mere 2%, but it was enough to cut communications.

Although it’s considered a long shot, NASA said Monday that its huge dish antenna in Canberra, Australia, is on the lookout for any stray signals from Voyager 2, currently more than 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometers) distant. It takes more than 18 hours for a signal to reach Earth from so far away.

In the coming week, the Canberra antenna — part of NASA’s Deep Space Network — also will bombard Voyager 2’s vicinity with the correct command, in hopes it hits its mark, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the Voyager missions.

Otherwise, NASA will have to wait until October for an automatic spacecraft reset that should restore communication, according to officials.

Voyager 2 was launched in 1977 to explore the outer planets, just a couple weeks ahead of its identical twin, Voyager 1.

Still in touch with Earth, Voyager 1 is now nearly 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away, making it humanity’s most distant spacecraft.

Science Friday

Could this be the end of voyager 1.

12:06 minutes

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In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 and 2. Their mission? To explore the farthest reaches of our galaxy. Their missions were only supposed to last about four years, but it’s been almost 50. They’re now in interstellar space, navigating the region between stars.

But since November, Voyager 1 has been sending unintelligible data back to Earth, raising concerns that it could be nearing the end of its mission.

Ira talks with Maggie Koerth, science writer and editorial lead at Carbon Plan , about Voyager 1 and other science news of the week, including work on detecting neutrinos with forests, calculating the age of giant sand dunes , uncovering the origins of cells , investigating why we don’t have tails anymore, and how a man walking his dog discovered a dinosaur fossil .

Further Reading

• Learn about historic moments in Voyager 1’s journey spanning billions of miles and more than four decades via Space.com .

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Segment Guests

Maggie Koerth is a science journalist based in  Minneapolis, Minnesota.

Segment Transcript

IRA FLATOW: This is Science Friday. I’m Ira Flatow. Later in the hour, using soil and poop samples to trace back the evolutionary roots of antibiotic resistance. And there’s a new math teacher in town, and she’s dressed in drag. Yes.

But first, surprising news from the FDA today, which is now delaying its decision on whether to approve a new Alzheimer’s treatment called donanemab. The news comes as a surprise because data shows that the drug made by Eli Lilly and company slows down cognitive decline by a little bit. The drug was expected to get approved this month.

The reason for the delay? Regulators want an independent panel to look more closely at the unique design of the drug trial. We’ll continue to follow this story in the coming weeks.

In other news, in 1977, NASA launched Voyagers 1 and 3. Their mission? To explore the farthest reaches of our solar system and beyond. Their space treks were– they’re only supposed to last about four years, but you know what? It’s been almost 50.

But since November, Voyager 1 has been sending gibberish back to Earth. Oh no. Brings up the question, could this be the beginning of the end of Voyager 1’s mission?

The week was full of great stories. And joining me with more about this one and others, Maggie Koerth, science writer, editorial lead at CarbonPlan, based in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Welcome back, Maggie. Always good to have you.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Thanks so much. It’s always good to be here.

IRA FLATOW: This is sad news, these voyages have gone where no spacecraft has gone before, they made this grand tour of the solar system, the flyby of other planets. What’s Voyager’s future, do we know?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah. I mean, this is so meaningful both scientifically and just existentially. This is a beloved piece of equipment. Right now, it is– the address for Voyager would be something like Voyager 1, interstellar space, outside the heliosphere. That’s the sun’s direct zone of influence. It’s more than 15 billion miles away from us. So it’s not like we can just pop out there with a tow truck.

Nell Greenfieldboyce at NPR described it as sort of like suffering from an electrical stroke. It’s this elderly piece of machinery. Everything it’s sending back is just this alternating 1 and 0 instead of real binary data. And the problem seems to be in the flight data computer, which sounds fancy, but remember, we’re talking about 1977 technology here. And your car key fob is now a more powerful computer than Voyager 1.

IRA FLATOW: So we don’t know if it’s a fixable thing or not.

MAGGIE KOERTH: We don’t. It’s survived glitches before but nothing this major. The scientists actually tried turning it off and turning it back on again. And that did not work. A lot of the people who designed this thing are actually dead now. So we can’t even go consult all of the Voyager experts. And just sending and receiving a message takes 45 hours round trip.

But it’s also reaching the end of its life anyway. So it’s powered by nuclear generators. And those aren’t going to keep going really past 2027 or 2030. Even if they do get it back online this time, we’re really at a point now where we all have to figure out how to make our peace with this thing. You’ve got to give it thanks. We’ve got to wish it well, let it go. As Spock said, “V’Ger must evolve.”

IRA FLATOW: There you go. Thank you for that, Maggie. I feel better. It is sad but, it has had a fruitful life. So let’s get back to terra firma literally for a bit, a story about– this, I think, is fantastic, trees detecting neutrinos, Maggie.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Oh, I love this so much. So neutrino is actually Italian for little neutral one. And that’s exactly what these are. They’re subatomic particles with no electrical charge. And they’re so small that scientists thought they had no mass at all for many years.

It’s also the most abundant type of subatomic particle in the universe, to the point that 100 trillion of them just pass through your body in the last second. But paradoxically, when you get that many super tiny things, passing through is mostly all they do. They’re so small that they can slip between larger atoms without interacting at all.

And that means if you want to detect them, you need to do it with something really, really, really big. When you get that big, it’s less convenient to build something than to use these very large objects that nature has already blessed us with, like forests full of hundreds of thousands of trees. And that is the proposal being made in this prepress paper by researchers at the University of Kansas.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. You mean so the leaves, the branches, they would be little antennas? I mean, well, they’re big antennas. They’re big trees.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Tree antennas. There is other research outside of this paper that shows that trees can pick up radio waves, though it’s not as simple as just hugging one and keeping an ear open. You’d have to wrap wire around each trunk. And you have to hook it up to electronics that can interpret the signals.

And other researchers outside of this paper also told Emily Conover at Science News that it would be a hard thing to pull off. And you’d need to do a lot more study because we don’t know things like what happens to your tree antennas when they go through a deciduous cycle and all the leaves fall off? So it’s not a perfect system.

But, but– and here’s the really cool thing to me– researchers already use nature to detect neutrinos. The IceCube neutrino observatory uses a cubic kilometer block of Antarctic ice. And there’s this other neutrino observatory that is currently under construction that’s going to use the entire Mediterranean Sea.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. Wow. I love that stuff. OK, let’s talk about something that sounds like it’s in outer space, but it’s here. There’s a new study about star dunes, just in time for the new Dune movie, right? What’s a star dune?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Well, so star dunes are these massive pyramidal sand dunes. They form on Earth as well as in Mars. We found them on Saturn’s moon of titan. And they can actually move without falling apart. And a recent study found one in Morocco that is 13,000 years old.

IRA FLATOW: Whoa. Whoa, so just found one of them? How do you know how old a sand dune is?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah, so this is where it gets really fun. So Lala Lallia, which is a Berber name, and it means sacred high point, it’s 238 feet high. It’s 2,200 feet wide.

But measuring the age of a pile of sand is really hard. And it turns out, though, that grains of quartz that make up the sand, they all store energy from the sun. And they can release that energy in the form of light. And the level of brightness of that light can tell the scientists how long ago the grain of quartz was last exposed to the sun.

So the trick to this was extracting sand from inside of the pyramid, getting it back to a darkroom condition in the lab without exposing it to the sun again and ruining the measurement. And to do that, they used an old piece of drainpipe, Ira.

IRA FLATOW: They MacGyvered it to bring it back to the lab. That’s great. Speaking of old, old grains of sand, our next few stories are about origins. And this one is a study that hints at the origin of cells, Maggie. Tell us about that because we’ve been wondering about that ever since the Miller-Urey experiment in 1952.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah. Well, this is a couple of interesting studies. So we know that early Earth primordial soup, chemicals– you got your cyanide. You got your glycerols. And we know that at some point, roughly 3.8 billion years ago, living cells.

But how you get from the soup to the nuts, so to speak? Right, how do you get a–

IRA FLATOW: Love it. Love it.

MAGGIE KOERTH: –discrete thing with walls and the ability to metabolize and generate energy? That’s the big mystery. So we had two studies recently that recreated the conditions we think existed on early Earth in a lab. And we’re able to coax chemical compounds into forming some of these crucial cell structures.

IRA FLATOW: That is really cool. Let’s move on to our next story about our tails or lack of them, suggesting why we lost them, evolutionary, right?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah. When our common ancestors split off from monkeys 25 million years ago, it doomed us to a life without a way to carry a drink and a plate and still eat at a party. And now scientists have pinpointed a mutation, maybe not the only one, but a mutation that seems to have been a cause of this change.

And there’s a couple of things that make it really, really cool. So first, we’re talking about something called a transposon, which is a repetitive little snippet of DNA that gets inserted into a human genome from something else. Some transposons we know started out as viruses. In other cases, we just have no clue where they came from.

And this particular transposon inserted itself into a hunk of a gene that isn’t even responsible for making anything. It’s noncoding data. And yet when you put the transposon in there, no tail. You delete tails. So the researchers even replicated this with mice.

IRA FLATOW: Wow. So do we still have this transposon?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah, we do.

IRA FLATOW: Does it have any side effects? Because we’re not using it.

MAGGIE KOERTH: They found this by analyzing 140 genes that are associated with vertebrate tail development until they found this one gene, TBXT, that had a chunk missing in monkeys that was present in primates. And they were able to replicate this in mice because the mice also don’t have this chunk. So when you stick the chunk in there in the mice, they lose their tails.

But the other interesting thing about this is that when you do this, the mice also end up with an increased risk of spina bifida, which is this birth defect where the spine doesn’t fully seal shut during development. So it is possible that a random side effect of losing our tails is the risk of this birth defect.

IRA FLATOW: Speaking of ancient, there’s a story about someone who stumbled upon a dinosaur while taking his dog for a walk.

MAGGIE KOERTH: So two years ago, this 23-year-old Frenchman named Damien Boschetto just found a whole heckin’  dinosaur bone sticking out the side of a cliff. Ira, this is massively unfair of him to live out my childhood dream. They eventually found 70% of this titanosaur in this spot, which is really amazing because you’re talking about a dinosaur that’s not really common in Europe. And that’s a really complete skeleton to find, too.

IRA FLATOW: That is cool. And so the guy, did it change his life at all, make him richer or whatever, when you find a big dinosaur?

MAGGIE KOERTH: Yeah. I mean, two years ago, he was just an amateur fossil hound. But then he spent those two years helping scientists dig up this skeleton. And he is now in college working his way towards a PhD in Paleontology. That jerk.

IRA FLATOW: You don’t mean the person. You mean the pulling of the bone.

MAGGIE KOERTH: [LAUGHS] Sure. That’s what I mean. I have nothing against this man who’s living my dreams.

IRA FLATOW: There you go. Maggie, always a pleasure. You bring us such great stories. Thanks for taking time to be with us today.

MAGGIE KOERTH: Thank you.

IRA FLATOW: Maggie Koerth, science writer and editorial lead at CarbonPlan, based in Minneapolis.

Copyright © 2023 Science Friday Initiative. All rights reserved. Science Friday transcripts are produced on a tight deadline by 3Play Media. Fidelity to the original aired/published audio or video file might vary, and text might be updated or amended in the future. For the authoritative record of Science Friday’s programming, please visit the original aired/published recording. For terms of use and more information, visit our policies pages at  http://www.sciencefriday.com/about/policies/

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Rasha Aridi is a producer for Science Friday. She loves stories about weird critters, science adventures, and the intersection of science and history.

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NASA Decodes the Reason Behind Voyager 1's Garbled Transmissions

For months, NASA's Voyager team has been struggling to translate garbled messages from beyond our solar system. Voyager 1 has been responding to NASA's data requests with tangles of 1s and 0s, none of which have made sense to anyone at the agency. But now, thanks to a "poke command" issued in March, the spacecraft seems to have helped scientists identify the error behind its wonky transmissions. 

NASA had just managed to solve an issue with Voyager 1's attitude articulation and control system (AACS) in 2022 when a new glitch arose, jumbling the probe's flight data. This raw data is supposed to convey information about what Voyager 1's various scientific instruments have gleaned from remote regions of the Milky Way, but instead, it was just a mysterious stream of unintelligible numbers. Getting the spacecraft to return to its original "language" has been a challenge ever since, in part because most of the folks who originally worked on Voyager 1 are no longer alive .

In March, NASA sent Voyager 1 a poke command, or a command that directly modifies a system's memory addresses. Though poke commands are a fairly antiquated concept, they're occasionally useful for low-level memory control—a stone the Voyager team couldn't leave unturned. Their command prompted Voyager 1's system into using a different readout sequence for its software package than it typically defaults to, and about 22 hours later, NASA found itself with a new clue.

According to a Voyager mission blog post , activity from one portion of Voyager 1's flight data system (FDS) stood out from the probe's previous unreadable transmissions. A single engineer involved in NASA's Deep Space Network saw that the data contained a readout of Voyager 1's full FDS memory. This, the engineer noticed, offered the team an opportunity to compare and contrast Voyager 1's previous FDS readout with the latest snapshot of its inner workings.   

NASA has since used the decoded readout to determine that roughly 3 percent of the probe's memory is corrupted. This may explain why restarting the FDS didn't resolve the issue back in November: If a system's memory has degraded, turning that system off and back on again won't do anything to bring it back. Luckily, engineers at the Voyager mission think the corruption is confined to just one chip, which could make the issue easier to circumvent or resolve. 

NASA engineers discover why Voyager 1 is sending a stream of gibberish from outside our solar system

Voyager 1 has been sending a stream of garbled nonsense since November. Now NASA engineers have identified the fault and found a potential workaround.

For the past five months, the Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending a steady stream of unreadable gibberish back to Earth. Now, NASA engineers finally know why.

The 46-year-old spacecraft sends regular radio signals as it drifts further from our solar system . But in November 2023, the signals suddenly became garbled, meaning  scientists were unable to read any of its data, and they were left mystified about the fault's origins. 

In March, NASA engineers sent a command prompt, or "poke," to the craft to get a readout from its flight data subsystem (FDS) — which packages Voyager 1's science and engineering data before beaming it back to Earth. 

After decoding the spacecraft's response, the engineers have found the source of the problem: The FDS's memory has been corrupted.

Related: NASA's Voyager 1 sends readable message to Earth after 4 nail-biting months of gibberish

"The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn't working," NASA said in a blog post Wednesday (March 13) . "Engineers can't determine with certainty what caused the issue. Two possibilities are that the chip could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or that it simply may have worn out after 46 years."

— NASA hears 'heartbeat' signal from Voyager 2 probe a week after losing contact

— Historic space photo of the week: Voyager 2 spies a storm on Saturn 42 years ago

— NASA reestablishes full contact with Voyager 2 probe after nail-biting 2-week blackout

Although it may take several months, the engineers say they can find a workaround to run the FDS without the fried chip — restoring the spacecraft's messaging output and enabling it to continue to send readable information from outside our solar system.

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Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 zipped past Saturn and Jupiter in 1979 and 1980 before flying out into interstellar space in 2012. It is now recording the conditions outside of the sun's protective magnetic field , or heliosphere, which blankets our solar system.

Voyager 1 is currently more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and it takes 22.5 hours for any radio signal to travel from the craft to our planet.

Ben Turner is a U.K. based staff writer at Live Science. He covers physics and astronomy, among other topics like tech and climate change. He graduated from University College London with a degree in particle physics before training as a journalist. When he's not writing, Ben enjoys reading literature, playing the guitar and embarrassing himself with chess.

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• TorbjornLarsson Bon voyage, Voyager! Reply
• Jay McHue What if aliens are doing it to try to communicate with us? 🤪 Reply

Jay McHue said: What if aliens are doing it to try to communicate with us? 🤪

admin said: Voyager 1 has been sending a stream of garbled nonsense since November. Now NASA engineers have identified the fault and found a potential workaround. NASA engineers discover why Voyager 1 is sending a stream of gibberish from outside our solar system : Read more

sourloaf said: What does FSB mean?

Rusty Lugnuts said: Where are you seeing "FSB"? The closest thing I can see in the article is "FDS". In modern computers, FSB would most likely refer to the Fr0nt S1ide Bu5, though I have no idea if a system as old as Voyagers, let alone engineered so specifically, would have an FSB. (apparently I can't spell out "Fr0nt S1ide Bu5" or my post gets flagged as spam or inappropriate??)

• SkidWard Just cut the % of ram needed... skip the bad sectors Reply
• kloudykat FDS = fl1ght da1a sub5ystem5 Reply
• 5ft24dave This is pretty old news, like 6 months old. Are you guys just now discovering this? Reply

Commodore Browncoat said: That's about as sane a theory as many of the others that have become ridiculously popular in the past several years, so sure - why not? What reply do you think we should send?

• View All 11 Comments

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Voyager is sending ‘impossible data’ back to Nasa from the edge of the Solar System

Nasa’s engineering team is investigating a mystery taking place on the Voyager 1 spacecraft .

Voyager 1 is the most distant human-made object in existence, having launched 44 years ago. It is currently operating at the edge of the solar system , flying through the “interstellar medium” beyond the Sun’s influence.

However, scientists found that the craft is receiving and executing commands from Earth successfully – but the readouts from the probe’s attitude articulation and control system (AACS) do not reflect what is actually happening on board Voyager 1.

The system maintains the craft’s orientation, keeping its antenna pointed precisely to the Earth so that data can be sent from it to Nasa. While all indications suggest that the AACS is working as normal, the telemetry data it is returning appears to be randomly generated – failing to reflect any possible state that the system could be in.

Further, the issue has not triggered any fault protection system that could put Voyager into safe mode, and the signal has not weakened – suggesting that the antenna is still in its normal position, pointing towards Earth.

Nasa says that it will continue to monitor the situation, as it is possible that the invalid data could be being produced by another system, but says that it does not understand why it is happening or how long this issue could continue. It takes approximately two days for a message from Earth to reach Voyager and get a response from the craft.

“A mystery like this is sort of par for the course at this stage of the Voyager mission,” said Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager 1 and 2 at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

“The spacecraft are both almost 45 years old, which is far beyond what the mission planners anticipated. We’re also in interstellar space – a high-radiation environment that no spacecraft have flown in before. So there are some big challenges for the engineering team. But I think if there’s a way to solve this issue with the AACS, our team will find it.”

There is a possibility that Nasa will not find the source of the issue and instead have to issue software changes or use one of the craft’s backup systems – something that has been done before in 2017 when Voyager had to switch from its primary thrusters to secondary ones because of signs of degradation.

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NASA’s Voyager 1 Is Glitching, Sending Nonsense From Interstellar Space

The aging spacecraft, launched in 1977, is transmitting a gibberish pattern of ones and zeros back to Earth

Margaret Osborne

Daily Correspondent

NASA’s Voyager 1 probe is experiencing a glitch that’s causing it to send a repeating, gibberish pattern of ones and zeroes back to Earth, the agency announced this week. The spacecraft is still able to receive and execute commands sent to it, but it’s unable to transmit back science or engineering data. 

After ruling out other possibilities, the Voyager team determined the spacecraft’s issues stem from one of its three computers, called the flight data system (FDS). Last weekend, engineers tried to restart the FDS to see whether they could resolve the problem, but the probe still isn’t returning usable data, according to NASA. 

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and its twin spacecraft Voyager 2 are NASA’s longest-operating mission. They are the only probes to ever explore interstellar space , or the vast area between stars. The spacecraft were initially launched to study Jupiter and Saturn, and they were only intended to last five years . But after making a series of discoveries—including spotting active volcanoes on Jupiter’s moon Io—NASA extended their mission. Both spacecraft carry a “ golden record ,” a 12-inch, gold-plated, copper disk that contains sounds and images to represent humankind in case any extraterrestrials ever encounter them.

My twin Voyager 1 is having a bit of trouble with its Flight Data System, but our team is on it! Details from @NASAJPL below. -V2 https://t.co/DRnxCzYLv5 — NASA Voyager (@NASAVoyager) December 12, 2023

By today’s standards, the technology aboard the Voyager crafts is ancient. Their computers only have 69.63 kilobytes of memory —about enough to store an average jpeg file. To make room for new observations, they must erase data after sending it to Earth.

“The Voyager computers have less memory than the key fob that opens your car door,” Linda Spilker , a planetary scientist who started working on the Voyager missions in 1977, told Scientific American ’s Tim Folger last year.

But the simple, yet hardy design of the Voyagers has contributed to their longevity and allowed them to hop between missions to collect valuable data. Still, both aging spacecraft have experienced glitches. Over the summer, a human error caused Voyager 2’s antenna to tilt two degrees away from Earth , leading researchers to lose contact with the craft for more than a week before its functions returned to normal. In 2022, an issue in the attitude articulation and control system (AACS) of Voyager 1 caused it to send “garbled information about its health and activities to mission controllers, despite operating normally,” per NASA . Engineers were eventually able to solve the glitch. 

Right now, Voyager 1 is hurtling through space about 15 billion miles from Earth and Voyager 2 is more than 12.6 billion miles away. Because the spacecraft are so distant, commands from mission controllers take 22.5 hours to reach Voyager 1. This means it takes 45 hours to determine whether a command to the spacecraft has had the intended outcome. NASA says it could take several weeks to develop a new plan to fix the current FDS problem. 

“Finding solutions to challenges the probes encounter often entails consulting original, decades-old documents written by engineers who didn’t anticipate the issues that are arising today,” NASA says in its statement. “As a result, it takes time for the team to understand how a new command will affect the spacecraft’s operations in order to avoid unintended consequences.” 

Calla Cofield, a media relations specialist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which manages the mission, tells CNN ’s Ashley Strickland engineers are now working to find the underlying cause of the problem before figuring out next steps. 

“The Voyagers are performing far, far past their prime missions and longer than any other spacecraft in history,” Cofield tells the publication. “So, while the engineering team is working hard to keep them alive, we also fully expect issues to arise.”

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Margaret Osborne | | READ MORE

Margaret Osborne is a freelance journalist based in the southwestern U.S. Her work has appeared in the  Sag Harbor Express  and has aired on  WSHU Public Radio.

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• Jet Propulsion Laboratory

Associate Director for Flight Projects and Mission Success

Jpl chief engineer, director for astronomy and physics, news media contacts.

The staff changes tap into a deep well of talent and experience across JPL as the laboratory looks to the future.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory is pleased to announce three key staff appointments, naming Keyur Patel the associate director for Flight Projects and Mission Success, Howard Eisen chief engineer, and Todd Gaier director for Astronomy and Physics.

As associate director for Flight Projects and Mission Success, Keyur Patel oversees the implementation and operations of all JPL flight missions. (JPL currently manages more than three dozen flying missions and science instruments to study Earth, our solar system, and beyond.) He succeeds Leslie Livesay , who became JPL’s deputy director in March.

Since beginning at JPL in 1985, Patel has served as director for Astronomy and Physics, deputy director for Planetary Science, director for the Interplanetary Network Directorate, deputy director for Solar System Exploration, and deputy director for the Office of Safety and Mission Success. He has led flight projects as project manager for the Dawn mission, deputy project manager and chief engineer for Deep Impact, and flight engineering office manager for the Spitzer Space Telescope. Patel holds master’s and bachelor’s degrees in aerospace engineering from California State Polytechnic University, Pomona.

Howard Eisen, who for the past year has served as the deputy associate director for Flight Projects and Mission Success, has assumed the role of chief engineer while continuing with his deputy associate director duties. He takes over the role from Rob Manning, who will remain in the Office of the Chief Engineer, applying his decades of experience and institutional knowledge in service of missions and projects across the laboratory. Manning will work with Eisen as he transitions into his new role.

A JPL Fellow, Eisen has over 36 years of experience at JPL in technical and leadership roles. He previously served as chief engineer for the Planetary Science Directorate, deputy project manager for the Asteroid Redirect Robotic Mission, flight system manager for the Mars 2020/Perseverance Mars rover and Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, project manager for the International Space Station Rapid Scatterometer mission, and deputy flight system manager for the Mars Science Laboratory/Curiosity Mars rover. He holds a master’s degree in aerospace systems and bachelor’s degrees in astronautics/avionics and physics from Massachusetts Institute of Technology, as well as a master’s in business administration from the University of Redlands.

Todd Gaier becomes director of Astronomy and Physics after previously serving as its deputy director and chief technologist. He was also co-investigator and project manager for the Temporal Experiment for Storms and Tropical Systems Demonstration (TEMPEST-D). He joined JPL in 1996, leading a group that developed technologies and instruments using monolithic microwave integrated circuit components. His group supported projects that include the Planck Low Frequency Instrument, the advanced microwave radiometers for the Jason-2 and -3 missions, the integrated receivers for the Juno microwave radiometers, and the Compact Ocean Wind Vector Radiometer (COWVR). He holds a doctorate in physics from the University of California, Santa Barbara and a bachelor’s in physics from Tufts University.

Gaier is a JPL Fellow and a senior research scientist. He is the recipient of NASA’s Exceptional Public Achievement and Outstanding Public Leadership medals.

A division of Caltech in Pasadena, California, JPL began in 1936 and ultimately built and helped launch America’s first satellite, Explorer 1, in 1958. By the end of that year, Congress established NASA, and JPL became a part of the agency. Since then, JPL has managed such historic deep space missions as Voyager, Galileo, Cassini, and a continuous fleet of landers, orbiters, and rovers at Mars since 1997. JPL managed the Spitzer Space Telescope and built the Wide Field and Planetary Camera 2 for Hubble as well as the Mid-Infrared instrument (MIRI) on the James Webb Space Telescope. Around our home planet, JPL has over two dozen spacecraft and instruments studying our atmosphere, climate change, sea level, and more.

Veronica McGregor / Matthew Segal Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. [email protected] / [email protected] 818-354-9452 / 818-354-8307

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