The Voyager 1 and 2 probes are icons of solar system exploration during the last quarter of the 20th centuryE Over the next century, Voyager 1 became a probe of the interstellar medium in particular, adding to our knowledge. But since November 2023, the probe has only transmitted an incoherent message to Earth, raising fears that its mission has become impossible. But since the beginning of March 2024, hope has been reborn.
All members of Generation X have undoubtedly been marked by the Voyager probes that began their glorious journey through the solar system nearly 50 years ago. Voyager 2Voyager 2 left first in the direction of GuruGuru On August 20, 1977 and then on September 5, 1977, it was the Voyager 1 probe’s turn to launch to the planets of the Solar System.
Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 took us to the volcanoes of Io, the ice floors of Europa, and atmosphereatmosphere Ashanta Jupiter and SatSat And some glimpses of it TitanTitan. If Voyager 1 then departed for the fringes of the Solar System, it was Voyager 2 that was the first visitor to the flyby noosphere. UranusUranus And NeptuneNeptune.
Video for the 40th anniversary of the Voyager mission. To get the most accurate French translation, click on the white rectangle at the bottom right. English subtitles should appear afterwards. Then click on the nut to the right of the rectangle, then on “Subtitles” and finally on “Translate automatically”. Select “French”. © NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory
Voyager mission members included the late Andre Brahic, who was discovered by the French in the 1980s, but also Carl Sagan, who with Frank Drake was at the origin of the famous Voyager gold record (or Voyager Golden Record) title The Sounds of Earth (“The Sounds of the Earth”) and two versions of which are on two probes. Containing images and sounds of representatives of Earth and its noosphere, they serve as “interstellar sea bottles” for potential extraterrestrial civilizations capable of finding and retrieving such bottles.
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Voyager’s golden disks, along with their contents, could last for several billion years, according to their creators. In 40,000 years, Voyager 1 will be just 1.6 light-years from Gliese 445, an M-type red dwarf currently located 17.6 light-years from the Sun but which will then be only 3.45 light-years away. Its movement and the motion of the Sun in the Milky Way. Each of these discs is made of gilded copper covered with aluminum into which radioactive uranium 238 atoms have been inserted. It is an isotope with a half-life of about 4.5 billion years. Any ET civilization in the galaxy will probably find it one day, for example before the sun becomes a red giant, so it can date the disc and the probe carrying it.
From interplanetary probes to interstellar probes
During the 2010s, the Voyager 1 probe became an interstellar probe, crossing the heliopause at 17 km/s, the bubble of the solar wind that surrounds the Sun.
Remember that the heliopause is defined as the boundary where the pressure of the solar wind balances the pressure of the plasma in the interstellar medium. At least for many, as some prefer to consider the border of the solar system the cloudthe cloud No CometComet De Oort, i.e. the limits of the Sun’s gravitational influence compared to others the starsthe stars.
l’EnergyEnergy That allows the Voyager 1 probe to make observations and communicate with Earth far from the Sun, which renders the solar panels passive, is provided by three. generatorgenerator Thermoelectric |555711c49b01842b9b61c793e5c99952|-IsotopeIsotope (RTG) based on radioactive decay PlutoniumPlutonium 238 produces the heatthe heat converted into electricity. The probe was supposed to be able to operate until 2025, but last year there were fears that the Voyager 1 mission had already ended.
We can understand the concern of NASANASA Reported by Frank’s daughter, along with a statement from Voyager mission project manager Suzanne Dodd (seen in the video above) at the time. DrakeDrakeNadia Drake, in a Scientific American article she dedicates to this phenomenon: “ This is the most serious problem we’ve faced since I’ve been project manager, and it’s scary because you lose communication with the spacecraft. »
there resolutionresolution The problem is already complicated by the fact that it takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to reach Voyager 1 24 billion kilometers from Earth, and so the engineering team in charge has to wait 45 hours to hear back from Voyager 1 and determine whether the command has Expected result. After all, the engineers who start working on this mission and who are familiar with it and the technology of the time are becoming rare, yet they have the best chance of solving the problem. As a NASA press release explains, this often indicates that ” Modern engineers must consult original documents that are decades old, written by engineers who did not anticipate the problems that arise today. It takes time for the team to understand how the new command will affect the spacecraft’s operations to avoid unintended consequences. “
In this case, the problem began to manifest itself in November 2023 by the fact that instead of receiving a complex series of 0s and 1s, the coded data contained BinaryBinary Since Voyager 1, 0 and 1 have been nothing more than meaningless repetitions of the group.
Yet the engineers concluded that the problem lay in one of the three computerscomputers onboard Voyager 1, called the Flight Data System (Flight Data System or SDS in English). It no longer communicates properly with the probe’s subsystem responsible for sending scientific or technical data on the probe’s health and status back to Earth.
On March 1, 2024, NASA made an attempt by sending a notification to investigate, and on March 3 it received a message that was no longer repeatable but which still remained unreachable to an engineer. Deep Space NetworkDeep Space Network of the agency, which operates the radio antenna that communicates with Voyager and other spacecraft. the moonthe moon And beyond that, can’t figure out how to decode it.
It turned out that the message sent consisted of reading the entire memory of the FDS, its code, or instructions on what to do, as explained in a NASA press release, as well as the variables or values used in the code. which may change depending on commands or spacecraft conditions. It is possible that Voyager 1’s electronic memory was affected in some way cosmic raycosmic ray One or more bits of energy and information outside the heliopause have been altered causing mistakemistake.
To explore and test other hypotheses, NASA engineers undertook the task of comparing the contents of the memory before and after the bug. The operation will take time and we can only cross our fingers hoping that the problem will be solved before 2025.
