NASA Voyager 1

The puzzling signal is coming from onboard the spacecraft, but there's a challenge in diagnosing from afar. NASA/Hulton Archive/Getty Images.

“And we don’t understand that yet.” But the telemetry signal itself “does not make any sense,” producing either all zeros or the number 377, Dodd says. “But it hasn’t gone into any kind of fault protection, which tells us that the spacecraft thinks it’s just fine. As Voyager 1 wades through the edge of our cosmic lake, where the magnetic field of the Sun interacts with the interstellar medium in ways that are yet to be fully understood, things might happen. “It’s something in the circuitry,” she says. The signal from the computer that keeps Voyager 1’s antenna pointed towards Earth is sending back erroneous number sequences, such as rows of zeros.

NASA Voyager 1: where is space probe and why is it sending back 'impossible data' from edge of Solar System? NASA scientists are struggling to understand data ...

Ms Dodd confirmed the space probe is currently in the interstellar medium, saying: “We’re [also] in interstellar space – a high-radiation environment that no spacecraft have flown in before. So there are some big challenges for the engineering team. Scientists have been left baffled after the NASA Voyager 1 space probe sent back “impossible data” from the edge of the Solar System.

The farthest spacecraft from Earth is beaming back weird telemetry data.

Is the AACS the culprit or is another system experiencing a glitch? They're both in interstellar space, which Voyager 1 and 2 project manager Suzanne Dodd describes as a "high-radiation environment that no spacecraft have flown in before." NASA's 45-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft is a marvel.

Find out about Nasa spacecraft Voyager 1, which launched in 1977 and has travelled past Jupiter, Saturn and beyond the solar system.

Upon reaching Saturn, it found a new G-ring plus five then-unknown moons. Where exactly in space is the Nasa Voyager 1? Voyager 1 launched in 1977, along with another Nasa space probe called Voyager 2. What is Nasa Voyager 1 and what does it do? It is back in the news as of May 2022 – as Nasa reveals it has been sending back puzzling data. Back in 2021, Voyager 1 made headlines for picking up a faint hum coming from beyond the edge of our solar system.

Voyager 1, NASA's spacecraft in interstellar space, is sending back weird data — but it doesn't seem to be affecting the spacecraft's mission.

Adapting is a way of life for the Voyager teams. But it’s returning data that doesn’t accurately describe what the system is doing, according to NASA. “For instance, the data may appear to be randomly generated, or does not reflect any possible state the AACS could be in,” NASA wrote in a press release. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 has been exploring the cosmos for nearly half a century. It’s a mystery that does not seem to be putting the Voyager 1 spacecraft in any immediate jeopardy, but NASA is trying to figure it out nonetheless. At a distance of 14.5 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 is the farthest human-made object in space. It has a twin, Voyager 2, that was launched 16 days prior in the same year.

The 45-year-old Voyager 1 deep space probe is showing its age as NASA engineers try to determine why it is sending back invalid telemetry data from its ...

If the source cannot be found, the alternative may be to switch to a redundant hardware system. According to NASA, the malfunction wasn't serious enough to trigger the onboard fault protection systems and the signal isn't losing strength, showing that the high-gain antenna is still pointing in the right direction. It manages this thanks to its three plutonium-fueled Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs) that are expected to continue to provide the probe with power until sometime after 2025.