Voyager 1 Is Returning a Mishmash of 1s And 0s From Space. NASA Is Baffled

Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object from Earth, is sending back a repetitive jumble of 1s and 0s that don’t make any sense.

Scientists at NASA are desperately trying to fix the glitch from 24 billion kilometers (15 billion miles) away.

The probe can still receive commands from Earth but messages to interstellar space require approximately 22.5 hours of travel.

That means it will take days before experts know if their attempts to restore the probe’s nearly 50-year-old computers have worked or not.

This isn’t the first time that Voyager 1 has sent back random readouts. In 2022, the probe started returning some of its data through a broken computer onboard, corrupting the outgoing messages.

Engineers at NASA managed to figure the problem out and fix it. But it took several months.

In this case, the glitch is coming from a disruption in communication between one of three computers onboard, called the probe’s flight data system (FDS), and one of the probe’s subsystems: the telemetry modulation unit (TMU).

This means that no science data about interstellar space is returning to Earth. What’s more, engineering data describing the health and status of the probe is also a jumbled mess.

And yes, before you ask, engineers have tried turning the FDS on and off.

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