NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is talking nonsense. Its friends on Earth are worried

DigitalTraveler42 , 3 months ago

It's going to be like that Star Trek episode where they find Voyager and it's evolved and achieved sentience.

clgoh , 3 months ago

Not an episode, the Motion Picture.

Telodzrum , 3 months ago

Ehh, they're right and wrong. Nomad from the episode with the same title is the early version of what eventually became the plot concept for Vger in Star Trek: The Motion Picture.

Synthuir , 3 months ago

Or 17776

Morefan , 3 months ago

Ster-il-ize

0x0 , 3 months ago

V'ger, wasn't it a movie?

stoly , 3 months ago

Or the one the Klingons destroyed for target practice.

autotldr Bot , 3 months ago

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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The last time Stamatios "Tom" Krimigis saw the Voyager 1 space probe in person, it was the summer of 1977, just before it launched from Cape Canaveral, Florida.

"It basically stopped talking to us in a coherent manner," says Suzanne Dodd of NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, who has been the project manager for the Voyager interstellar mission since 2010.

So to try to fix Voyager 1's current woes, the dozen or so people on Dodd's team have had to pore over yellowed documents and old mimeographs.

"They're doing a lot of work to try and get into the heads of the original developers and figure out why they designed something the way they did and what we could possibly try that might give us some answers to what's going wrong with the spacecraft," says Dodd.

Linda Spilker, who serves as the Voyager mission's project scientist at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, says that when she comes to work she sees "all of these circuit diagrams up on the wall with sticky notes attached.

Mission managers have turned off heaters and taken other measures to conserve power and extend the Voyager probes' lifespan.

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