Spending 45 years traversing the solar system may negatively affect a spacecraft, and this is what appears to have happened with the “Voyager 1” mission, which explores with its twin “Voyager 2” places that nothing has traveled from Earth before, very far from Earth and the Sun in what It is farther than Pluto.

A report published by Space.com states that NASA's "Voyager 1" mission was launched in 1977, and moved to what scientists call "interstellar space" in 2012, a region full of material expelled by the death of nearby stars. Millions of years ago, it continues to function to this day.

The spacecraft is now 23.3 billion kilometers from Earth, and while it's still operating well, scientists have noticed that the mission has recently been confused about its position in space without entering safe mode or raising an alarm.

"A mystery like this kind of goes along with the trajectory of this phase of the Voyager mission," said Susan Dodd, Voyager 1 and 2 project manager - at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

Dodd added - in a statement to NASA - that "the spacecraft is approximately 45 years old, which is much more than what the mission planners expected, and we are in interstellar space, a highly radioactive environment that no spacecraft has reached before."

The goal of the Voyager mission is to expand NASA's exploration of the solar system beyond the boundaries of the outer planets (NASA)

puzzle

The glitch appears to be related to Voyager 1's positioning and control system (AACS), which keeps the spacecraft and its antenna in the correct position, but the system appears to be working fine, as the spacecraft receives commands, acts accordingly, and sends scientific data back to Earth with the same signal strength as usual. However, the system sends unwanted telemetry data related to the spacecraft's processors.

But the NASA statement does not specify when the problem began or how long it lasted. The agency says that Voyager employees continue to investigate the problem and try to fix or adapt it. This is a slow process because the signal sent from Earth currently takes 20 hours and 33 minutes to reach Voyager 1;

It takes the same time to receive the spacecraft's response.

twin vehicle

NASA said that the Voyager 2 probe (the twin spacecraft of Voyager 1), which was also launched in 1977, and which entered interstellar space on November 5, 2018;

They operate normally, but the energy the spacecraft can produce is always declining, and mission team members have turned off some components to save energy, measures they hope will keep the sensors operating until at least 2025.

The energy that the Voyager 2 spacecraft can produce is always declining (NASA)

The main mission of the spacecraft was to explore Jupiter and Saturn, and after making a series of discoveries there - such as active volcanoes on Jupiter's moon Io and the intricacies of Saturn's rings - the mission was extended, and Voyager 2 continued to explore Uranus and Neptune, and remains the only spacecraft to visit those The outer planets.

The current mission of the two spacecraft, known as "Voyager Interstellar", is to explore the outer edge of the Sun's sphere and beyond, and it faces some challenges. "There are huge challenges for the engineering team, but I think if there is a way to solve the positioning and control problem, our team will find it," Dodd says. .