Voyager 1 spacecraft is talking nonsense. Its friends on Earth are worried

https://www.npr.org/2024/03/06/1236033493/nasas-voyager-1-spacecraft-is-talking-nonsense-its-friends-on-earth-are-worried

by pavel_lishin • 2 years ago

41 17 2 years ago

npr.org

h2odragon• 2 years ago

tivert2• 2 years ago

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.

Couldn't they downlink a copy of the binary from Voyager 2?

hypeatei• 2 years ago

I always wonder if other life in the universe has "seen" Voyager 1 and what they think of it.

Maybe it's extremely complex and impressive to them or looks like an amateur made it.

tivert2• 2 years ago

I always wonder if other life in the universe has "seen" Voyager 1 and what they think of it.

No one's looked at it. It's in deep space, with a weak radio pointed highly directionally back at Earth.

Aliens are more likely to have listened to baseball games transmitted by your local clear-channel AM radio station, and be fans of your local team, than to have even considered Voyager.

mjklin• 2 years ago

It’s all fun and games until V’Ger starts seeking the Creator

deprecative• 2 years ago

Something like 99.99% of our own galaxy has no idea humans exist. Our radio signals haven't had time to reach that far. There's actually an interesting hypothesis that as a civilization progresses it is only radio emissions noisy for a brief period of time before technology advances and the radio signals effectively stop much like we see with our development here on Earth.

All that to say, no. Even if they were listening they'd not know we were here to begin with, at least yet.

explaininjs• 2 years ago

What are the radio waves you think have stopped on Earth?

FrontierPsych• 2 years ago

Nah. How would any civilization be able to distinguish it from any other tiny piece of material moving through space.

As far as radio waves go, no way.

Anything that we have sent out from Earth is indistinguishable from background noise of the universe.This propagation follows the inverse square law, which states that the intensity of the wave decreases as the square of the distance from the source increases. If you double the distance from the source, the intensity of the radio wave decreases by a factor of four. This means that the wave disperses and weakens as it travels away from its source. Its intensity diminishes according to the square of the distance.

hvs• 2 years ago

Reminded me of this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/17776

harpiaharpyja• 2 years ago

Instead of sending messages home in binary code, Voyager 1 is now just sending back alternating 1s and 0s.

Voyager 1: AAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAA...

Borealid• 2 years ago

Another interpretation is that it's trying to backspace everything it's ever sent.

lttlrck• 2 years ago

Brilliant. That's a writing prompt right there.

arp242• 2 years ago

And they said in space no one can hear you scream.

iso8859-1• 2 years ago

'A' has a lot of subsequent zeros:

>> bin(ord('A'))

'0b1000001'

It's sending stars or NAK (negative ack.):

>> chr(0b101010)

'*'

>> chr(0b010101)

'\x15'

smcameron• 2 years ago

0xA is 1010

petabyt• 2 years ago

Its Morse code.

bdjsiqoocwk• 2 years ago

Maybe it saw something and it's screaming in horror.

Voyager 1 spacecraft is talking nonsense. Its friends on Earth are worried

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