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Engineers fixed Voyager space probe's mysterious glitch but found another that's even stranger [1]

['David Pescovitz']

Date: 2022-09-01

For most of the year, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has been sending home mysterious system data. Launched in 1977, the Voyager 1—and its Golden Record, the iconic message for extraterrestrials—is currently 14.5 billon miles from Earth in interstellar space. So far, the Voyager mission has lasted far longer than ever expected, but in May, engineers determined that Voyager 1 was transmitting weird data about the health and activities of its attitude articulation and control system (AACS) responsible for aiming the probe's antenna pointed in the right direction.

Now, researchers determined that the onboard computer the AACS was transmitting the telemetry data through was corrupting the signals. They fixed the issue by reprogramming the AACS to send the data through a different computer. That solved the problem but revealed another mystery: the computer that corrupted the data hasn't worked at all in years and they have no idea why Voyager suddenly started using it again.

From NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory:

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