Thanks to NordVPN for sponsoring today’s video. In
early May 2022, Voyager 1’s signal went… strange. The spacecraft Voyager 1 is tasked with exploring
the areas beyond our solar system’s planets. It’s currently 24 billion km out, about 6 and a half
times further than the distance between the Sun and Pluto. Conditions are harsh in interstellar
space, as outside the Sun’s protective magnetic field you are constantly bombarded by cosmic rays
and interstellar radiation. It is the furthest out that any human spacecraft has ever gone.
Although it’s over 45 years old now, and its power supplies are dwindling, Voyager
1 has been consistently providing fascinating data about cosmic rays, magnetic fields, and
other features of the interstellar medium. So it was strange when one day, the
signals coming from Voyager 1 went… weird. I’m Alex McColgan, and you are watching Astrum.
Although at the time NASA scientists scrambled to figure out what was going wrong with Voyager 1, it
took them months to find out the answer. And there is still some mystery to what happened. Let’s
see those events through their eyes, as we ask: Can you solve the mystery of Voyager 1? Imagine
you are a NASA scientist. You arrive at your computer for the day, and begin looking through
the Voyager 1 telemetry data. Voyager 1 sends back status updates about its systems, letting you
know whether everything is functioning normally. It takes 22 hours now for a signal to reach Earth
from Voyager 1, so communication is a little slow between you and the craft you’re overseeing.
Currently, it is more like sending letters than texts. However, today, something is wrong.
The information it has sent you is gobbledegook. Instead of precise data explaining exactly
what Voyager 1’s thrusters are doing, and what orientation it believes itself to be at, you
get long strings of 0’s, or 377’s. The information does not make sense. It suggests that Voyager is
doing things and pointing directions that cannot be. You quickly check your computer again – yes,
you did just receive a signal from Voyager 1. So, its antenna must be pointing towards you, the
same as it always has. It cannot be pointing in the strange directions it is claiming, or
you would not be getting a signal at all. And not only are you receiving the signal,
but it’s at the exact same strength too, so it has definitely not changed its
direction. And, ping, onto your computer comes Voyager 1’s latest science data.
Strangely enough, this is all normal. While over the years Voyager 1 has had to turn off
5 of its 11 pieces of scientific equipment - and a further 2 have stopped working due to general
degradation - the remaining 4 continue to take readings about the interstellar medium, magnetic
fields and cosmic rays. Nothing here is garbled in any way. You check its other systems. Voyager
1’s power supplies are a little low, but that’s to be expected. The plutonium oxide that fills its
3 generators have a half-life of 87 years, but Voyager 1 has been travelling for 45 now. It is
no wonder the efficiency has started to decline. In fact, the experts believe that Voyager 1
will not last past 2025. But that is some time away. It does not explain what is happening
now. After checking its other systems, it is just one that is behaving strangely. The AACS
– the Attitude Articulation and Control System. This computer is one of 3 on Voyager 1, and
its job is to make sure the spacecraft’s large, 3m antennae continues to point towards Earth.
This AACS has stopped sending coherent data. You lean back, puzzled. The situation is not
as bad as you might have thought, but it is troubling. It’s kind of like receiving post from
a postman who says hello to you every morning, only for some reason he starts speaking another
language one day. The packages he delivers are still the same, and they’ve arrived at the same
address. It’s just the words the man speaks make no sense to you anymore. To further compound
the strangeness, Voyager 1 doesn’t think that anything is wrong with it at all. The spacecraft
comes equipped with emergency “safe mode” settings that it can go into if it detects that anything is
not working the way it ought to be. Essentially, these involve it powering down until scientists
can figure out what’s wrong with it. And these have not activated. So Voyager 1 believes that all
its systems are working the way they should be. The data is given, the scene is set. This was the
question that NASA engineers faced in mid-2022. A single fault like this might not seem like a
big deal, but it hints at something potentially going wrong with further systems. And if that is
true, it might spell an end to the whole mission. Voyager 1 is by now 23.8 billion km away from you.
Your solution will have to be made via deduction, alongside careful, 22-hour-each-way questions
and answers with the faulty spacecraft. By evaluating the rest of the systems and finding
them normal, you can rule out some of the more unusual explanations. No, this probably is not
the work of aliens trying to mess with you. Although Voyager 1 carries with it a golden disk
containing detailed information about the human race - including images of human biology,
the sounds of nature, musical symphonies, and mathematical equations, on the off chance
that it does bump into any aliens who would like to know about us – it seems that this would be
a strange way for aliens to communicate with us. And no, the laws of physics have probably not
broken down. Voyager 1 has not entered a wormhole that is skewing where it thinks it is while
still somehow getting the signal back to you. Given that the scientific data all appears to
be providing normal readouts, it’s much more likely that the problem lies with the AACS itself.
For four months, scientists and engineers gently prod and examine Voyager 1, testing theory after
theory and trying to come up with a solution that fixes things without causing any further damage
in the process. They could just switch over to a backup system. It would not be the first time
they’d started using a new computer on Voyager 1 after the old one stopped working. Voyager 1 is
built with redundancies; this isn’t even the first AACS computer that’s been used – a previous
one became defective a while ago. They also contemplate just leaving things be. After all
– the science data is still coming in. Would it be the end of the world if Voyager 1 simply
carried on speaking garbled messages? Perhaps this could simply be the new normal… except it
implies that a deeper problem is being overlooked. Can you figure out what was going wrong?
Feel free to have a guess in the comments. However, from just the information in this
video, it would be very impressive if you could. It turns out that in the intense, radiation-filled
environment of interstellar space, something had made Voyager decide to start using that older,
broken AACS computer to send data back to Earth. Because of the faults in this computer, the data
had become corrupted, resulting in the strange numbers. So actually, in this case the fix was
easy. All NASA had to do to fix it was to ask Voyager to start using the right computer again.
Once Voyager 1 did that, the problem was resolved. On this occasion, it was an easy
fix. But next time it might not be. Voyager 1 is an old ship, now. As it continues
to travel through interstellar space, it may encounter more and more faults. And there is
still a lingering mystery; why did it start using the old, broken computer? At the time of writing
this script, NASA still is not sure of the answer. Unfortunately, some of the systems on Voyager are
so old now that the people who designed them have long since retired. Perhaps this is one mystery
that will never fully be solved. I hope not, though. I hope Voyager 1 will travel further
and push the final frontier as far as it can go. And I also hope you enjoyed this format. To
me, science is all about solving mysteries. And in order to tackle the larger questions of
how the universe works, lots of smaller riddles need solving, such as finding and fixing a
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