The news about the Voyager 1 and 2 probes, unfortunately, but also logically, have been related for quite some time, practically in their entirety, with disorders. Of course, a cursory glance at their service records (both) is enough not only to fully understand what is going on, but also to continue to consider them, despite these failures, one of the great works of engineering and technology – space exploration.

The problem currently affecting Voyager 1 arose last December, since then the probe is sending meaningless data to Earth. The good news is that despite this failure, two-way communication remains functional, but the problem is that the solutions adopted so far have not been able to restore the sending of coherent information by the probe. And of course, the options in this regard are running out.

As we can read in Gizmodo, NASA suspects a failure in the flight data system (FDS), a problem that was identified some time ago that led the engineering teams to reconfigure the probe’s operation so that data could be managed and sent to Earth from another part of the probe, which solved the problem. time. But now the situation is happening again and the solution like restarting FDS (yes, powering off and on again works in space too) didn’t show any effect on this occasion.

Voyager 1 is currently sending telemetry data confirming the progress of its endless journey. The main objectives of the mission were completed decades ago, although the US space agency entrusted it with a new mission: to explore and study the limits of our solar system. For those who don’t remember, its original mission was to visit Jupiter and Saturn and get detailed pictures of both planets. It was launched into space on September 5, 1977, and at the time of this report, it is 24,365,369,128 kilometers from Earth and moving at a speed of about 22.5 kilometers per second (you can check the updated information per second at this link).

So, Both Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have been on sale for decadesand given the technology available at the time they were designed and built, it’s more than remarkable how far they’ve come, as well as the potential to remain functional at least in the short to medium term. Now Suzanne Dodd, project manager for the Voyager missions, has described the problem as “normal at this stage,” which is a polite way of saying that we’re at the point where they could permanently “fall apart” at any time.

NASA is used to us proposals that far exceed their original plans. Voyager and the Hubble Space Telescope are great paradigms in this regard, but we also find more recent cases, such as that of the Curiosity rover or, although we unfortunately learned a few weeks ago that its end was caused by an accident, the Ingenuity helicopter that accompanied the Ingenuity rover from its arrival at the Lake crater on the surface of Mars.

Images: NASA/Caltech