NASA engineers no longer understand what’s going on on Voyager 1

The operators of the NASA Voyager 1 automated interplanetary station face a mystery: a 45-year-old device that left the solar system ten years ago continues to operate normally, receiving and executing commands from Earth, and collecting and returning scientific data, but the readings from the attitude control systems are It does not reflect what actually happened on the ship. portal reports NASA.

The AACS probe’s attitude control systems control its position in space and allow, among other things, data exchange by pointing Voyager 1’s high-gain antenna precisely toward Earth. All indications are that AACS is still operational, but telemetry received by ground personnel is invalid. Everything seems to be randomly generated and does not reflect the possible situations AACS might be in.

This issue did not trigger any of the built-in failsafe systems that should put Voyager 1 in a state known as safe mode, where only basic operations are performed and giving engineers time to diagnose problems. The Voyager 1 signal was also not weakened, indicating that the high-gain antenna remained in its projected position relative to Earth.

Voyager 1 operators are currently trying to find the cause of the anomaly. The spacecraft itself is located at a distance of 23.3 billion km from Earth, signals from it last 20 hours and 33 minutes. This means it takes about two days to send a message to the machine and get a response from it.



Source: Gazeta

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