V’GER: JPL’s Voyager team ‘extremely hopeful’ after ailing, faraway craft shows signs of former self.

The elderly spacecraft has been speaking in gibberish since November 2023, and the Voyager engineering team has yet to fix the problem. As though a stroke left Voyager 1 with aphasia, it can hear the messages being sent from Earth but can’t respond coherently, providing no information on its health or status.

The issue likely lies in the flight data system (FDS), which compiles information about the spacecraft’s health, operational status and scientific observations into a string of 1’s and 0’s that are sent to Earth. Until recently, Voyager 1 had been transmitting a repetitive string of nonsense, indicating that the FDS may be “stuck”.

Without restoring communication, the Voyager team cannot tell what the probe needs to stay alive; consigning Voyager 1 to a lonely, unknowable demise.

“The likely cause of the issue is some type of corrupted bit structure in the FDS computer. We don’t know where that corruption is,” explained Dr. Suzanne Dodd, project manager for the Voyager Interstellar Mission, who describes this issue as the most serious she’s seen since joining the team in 2010.

In the past couple of weeks, Voyager 1 has shown promising signs of improvement. The probe is finally transmitting patterns of 1’s and 0’s that look familiar to the engineers.

Previously: “The problem was, the gibberish was coming from the flight direction software — something like an operating system. And no copy of that operating system remained in existence on Earth.”

Or maybe its knowledge has reached the limits of this universe and it must evolve.