Technology

Instead of sending messages home in binary code, Voyager 1 is now just sending back alternating 1s and 0s. Dodd's team has tried the usual tricks to reset things — with no luck.

It looks like there's a problem with the onboard computer that takes data and packages it up to send back home. All of this computer technology is primitive compared to, say, the key fob that unlocks your car, says Dodd.

"The button you press to open the door of your car, that has more compute power than the Voyager spacecrafts do," she says. "It's remarkable that they keep flying, and that they've flown for 46-plus years."

Wow. I mean, yeah, but. Crazy.

Is there any reason we haven't built a craft specifically to be slung out of the solar system as quickly as possible?

IIRC Voyager wasn't built for this, it's just a bonus that they're still semi operational.

I volunteer to go up there, fix it, change the batteries, install Doom. And don't worry about the 'fuel to get home' issue.

Voyager 1 is almost one light day away, and now my brain hurts thinking about it.

Is it possible that cosmic rays beyond the heliopause have damaged (bit-flipped) the radiation-hardened circuitry on board the spacecraft? That might cause it to start jibbering nonsense.

Crazy that after all this time we can still communicate with Voyager 1. Even though it is babbling back now.

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

This is the best summary I could come up with:

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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