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For the past five months , the Voyager 1 spacecraft has been send a regular current of unreadable gibber back to Earth . Now , NASAengineers finally experience why .
The 46 - year - erstwhile spacecraft transport regular radio signal as it drifts further from oursolar organisation . But in November 2023 , the signals suddenly became disconnected , think of scientist were ineffectual to read any of its data , and they were left mystified about the fault ’s extraction .
An artist’s illustration of Voyager 1 with its antenna pointed back at Earth.
In March , NASA engineers transport a command prompt , or " poke , " to the craft to get a read-out from its flight of steps data subsystem ( FDS ) — which packages Voyager 1 ’s science and engineering data before beam it back to Earth .
After decoding the space vehicle ’s response , the locomotive engineer have found the source of the job : The FDS ’s retentivity has been cloud .
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" The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected percentage of the FDS retentiveness is n’t working , " NASA say in a web log postWednesday ( March 13 ) . " Engineers ca n’t determine with certainty what caused the topic . Two possibilities are that the chip could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or that it plainly may have worn out after 46 years . "
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Although it may take several months , the engine driver say they can find a workaround to start the FDS without the fried chip — restoring the spacecraft ’s message output and enabling it to continue to send decipherable information from outside our solar organization .
Launched in 1977 , Voyager 1 zipped past Saturn and Jupiter in 1979 and 1980 before flying out into interstellar quad in 2012 . It is now show the shape outside of the sun ’s protective magnetic field , or heliosphere , which blankets our solar system .
Voyager 1 is presently more than 15 billion miles ( 24 billion klick ) from Earth , and it take 22.5 hours for any radio signal to travel from the craft to our major planet .
