The mission's distance from Earth makes it difficult to figure out why the spaceship seems to be confused about where it is.
The design lifetime of the mission was 5 years. A series of planetary flybys have taken place over the course of nearly 45 years, and the craft is currently around 23.3 billion kilometers from Earth. There have been many discoveries but also a number of anomalies. Junk data is being returned to Earth.
At a meeting of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine's Space Studies Board on Thursday (June 9), Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, said that there was a problem with the spaceship.
40 photos from the grand tour mission.
Zurbuchen said that the messages from the Attitude Articulation and Control System are not reflecting what is actually happening on the ship.
It is difficult to get to the bottom of this confusion due to the distance between Earth and Voyager 1 and the long delays in communication. Zurbuchen said that if you had a conversation with someone in which you could only say a single word, it would be a nightmare. You only hear back when you're awake. We have that kind of discussion.
Zurbuchen is confident that the mystery will be solved by the team. Due to the decay of the mission's nuclear power source, Voyager 1 is running at much colder temperatures than it was intended to be.
"I'm not telling you that it's the end of that mission because the team behind it has addressed many of the problems that have arisen over the years," he said.
"Make no mistake, there were issues, even since I'm at NASA, that really were concerning, the team has solved it," he said. If it is no longer solved, we should take out the champagne.
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