Skip to main content
  1. Home
  2. Space
  3. News

Something strange is up with 45-year-old spacecraft Voyager 1

Georgina Torbet
By

In the 1970s, two spacecraft were designed and built for the wildly ambitious mission to study the outer reaches of the solar system. More than 40 years later, the two Voyager spacecraft are, incredibly enough, still functioning and transmitting data, even as they have left most of the solar system behind and headed out into interstellar space. The two craft have survived various glitches and problems, however, a recent issue with Voyager 1 has engineers at NASA scratching their heads.

Voyager 1’s altitude articulation and control system (AACS) is sending back some strange readings, and engineers are puzzled as the craft is still operating normally. The AACS is responsible for keeping Voyager in the right orientation and making sure that its antenna is pointing toward Earth so that the spacecraft can transmit data. But now, the AACS is sending back data that doesn’t make any sense — the data looks like it could be scrambled, for example, or suggests that the system is in an impossible state — even though the antenna is still pointing the right way and transmitting just fine.

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, shown in this illustration, has been exploring our solar system since 1977, along with its twin, Voyager 2.
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, shown in this illustration, has been exploring our solar system since 1977, along with its twin, Voyager 2. NASA/JPL-Caltech

The good news is that the spacecraft is still transmitting, and the issue has not forced the craft to go into safe mode. The signal continues to come through as strong as it was before, so engineers are confident that the antenna hasn’t shifted. But why the AACS is misbehaving in this way remains a mystery.

Related

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

Recommended Videos

To try to figure out what the issue is, the team will keep monitoring the messages sent by the spacecraft to try and see if the problem is with the AACS itself, or with one of the systems that transmit the data. But this will take a while, as Voyager 1 is so far away — at 14.5 billion miles (23.3 billion kilometers) from Earth currently — that it takes a long time for the signals to travel that distance. It currently takes almost two days to send a signal and receive a response.

The team may or may not be able to find out what’s causing the issue, but for now, they are happy that the spacecraft is still operating and that the AACS issue is a puzzle but not an immediate threat to the craft’s well-being.

Editors' Recommendations

Topics
Georgina Torbet
Georgina Torbet
Space Writer
Georgina is the Digital Trends space writer, covering human space exploration, planetary science, and cosmology. She…
How much fuel is left in this 20-year-old Mars orbiter?
NASA’s 2001 Mars Odyssey orbiter is depicted in this illustration. The mission team spent most of 2021 assessing how much propellant is left on the orbiter, concluding it has enough to stay active through at least 2025.

Designing, building, and launching a spacecraft is hugely expensive. That's why NASA missions to Mars are designed with the hope that they'll last as long as possible -- like the famous Opportunity rover which was supposed to last for 90 days and managed to keep going for 15 years. The longer a mission can keep running, the more data it can collect, and the more we can learn from it.

That's true for the orbiters which travel around Mars as well as the rovers which explore its surface, like the Mars Odyssey spacecraft which was launched in 2001 and has been in orbit around Mars for more than 20 years. But the orbiter can't keep going forever as it will eventually run out of fuel, so figuring out exactly how much fuel is left is important -- but it also turned out to be more complicated than the NASA engineers were expecting.

Read more
Roman Space Telescope will survey the sky 1,000 times faster than Hubble
NASA’s Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope

Since its launch in 2021, the James Webb Space Telescope has been delighting space fans with its stunning views of space objects near and far. But NASA has another space telescope in the works that will be able to help answer even more of the big questions in astronomy. The Nancy Grace Roman Space Telescope, set to launch in 2027 and colloquially known as Roman, will look at vast areas of space to help cosmologists understand the universe on a large scale.

In astronomy research, it's important to be able to look both in very great detail and on a very wide scale. Telescopes like Hubble and James Webb have exceptional sensitivity, so they can look at extremely distant objects. Roman will be different, aiming to get a broad view of the sky. The image below illustrates the differences between the telescopes, showing what Roman and Hubble can capture in one go and comparing Hubble's detailed, but narrow view to Roman's much wider view.

Read more
There’s a problem with the Juno spacecraft’s camera
This illustration depicts NASA’s Juno spacecraft soaring over Jupiter’s south pole.

If you've enjoyed looking at beautiful images of Jupiter in recent years, then the odds are good that you've seen images taken by the JunoCam instrument on board the Juno spacecraft, currently in orbit around Jupiter. Unfortunately, this beloved science instrument has recently developed some problems, causing the loss of images collected during a recent flyby of the planet.

This illustration depicts NASA’s Juno spacecraft soaring over Jupiter’s south pole. NASA/JPL-Caltech

Read more