NASA is Worrie as Voyager 1 Sending Back Incomprehensible Code

NASA's two Voyager spacecraft have exhausted about 50 years moving through deep space.

The probes, which started less than a month apart in the summer of 1977, have remained a lot, from dwindling power supplies and grimy thrusters to near - fatal software problems.

Voyager 1, in specific, which is presently moving past the generally-explained corner of the solar system some 15 billion miles away, is seeming worse for fear these days.

A short time ago, researchers became tensed after the isolated probe begin conveying nonsensical information back to Earth — as if its old age was prevailing up with it.

"It firstly stopped interacting with us in a coherent way," Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd told NPR. "It's a major issue."

Instead of transmitting back binary code more than billion miles, Voyager 1 is sending 1s and 0s that just alternate.

They are unable to reorganize the aging probe so far — but that shouldn't come as unexpected, taking the technology dates back to the mid-1970s.

"The button you press to unlock the door of your car, that has more compute energy than the Voyager spacecrafts do," Dodd told NPR. "It's astonishing that they carry on flying, and that they've flown for more than 46 years."

While, the team back on the ground is attempting to "acquire into the minds of the real inventors and find out why they structured something the way they did," per Dodd, to figure out methods to fix the probe.

In upcoming months, astronomers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Lab will attempt a variation of separate perspective to get Voyager 1 back to doing science.

"We haven't been receiving science information since this anomaly begun," Caltech researcher Stella Ocker told NPR, "and what that signify is that we are not aware what the atmosphere  that the spacecraft is moving through appears like."

The probes' plutonium reserves, which give them with electricity, are also begin to move slow, encouraging their workers to take steps to conserve the dwindling power supplies.

"My goal for a long period of time was 50 years or bust," researcher Stamatios Krimigis, who has worked on the Voyager 1 mission from the initial point, told NPR, "but we're about reaching that."