'The people who built it are no longer alive,' NASA warns as the probe goes dark
NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has suffered another communications outage.
Voyager 1 was the first spacecraft to cross the heliosphere and is currently the farthest man-made object from Earth.
It was launched from Cape Canaveral in 1977 along with Voyager 2 as part of NASA's mission to explore Jupiter and Saturn.
Currently, the probe is about 15 billion miles from Earth and has been active for 4.5 decades.
However, the probe went dark due to a malfunction and has been unable to transmit data since November 14.
NASA engineers are now concerned and say there is a chance the spacecraft will not recover.
“It would be the biggest miracle if we got it back,” said Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd in an interview with Ars Technica.
The space agency did mention that the probe appears to receive and execute commands.
However, without the vessel sending back data, it is difficult for engineers to assess the problem.
This is only made more complicated by the age of the probe and its extreme distance from Earth.
To address the problem, scientists sent commands to the probe.
Each message takes about 22 hours to send, and once it's received by the probe, it can take days for a response to come back.
To make matters worse, many of the probe's instructions are not digitized.
“The people who built the spacecraft are no longer alive,” Dodd said.
“We have a pretty good set of documentation, but a lot of it is on paper, so you have to do archaeological research to get documents.
This isn't the first time Voyager 1 has had communications problems; a few months ago it spewed out strange binary data.
In computer language, binary data describes a particular power line in an electrical circuit that is either on (1) or off (0).
And in May 2022, the probe sent back data about its location and orientation in space that contradicted what NASA knew about its position.
“A mystery like this is appropriate for this phase of the Voyager mission,” Dodd said at the time.