NASA experts are trying to figure out what happened to the onboard transmitters of the American interplanetary probe Voyager-2, located on the border of the solar system
Last month, the probe spontaneously switched to a different format for transmitting research data. Employees of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (California) are unable to decipher the information transmitted in the new format, ITAR-TASS reports.
The laboratory said that until the problem is resolved, Voyager-2 is programmed from Earth to transmit data solely about the state of onboard systems and its location.
The sending of information in this category is formatted differently than scientific data, and is easily decoded on Earth. The representative of the laboratory in Pasadena, Ed Stone, believes that the problem is solvable and not related to the life of the interplanetary vehicle.
The exact answer should be given by the diagnostics of the onboard systems of the probe, which NASA specialists are now engaged in.
“Memory instability is akin to the memory of personal computers at boot time. An accidental hit of even one particle of cosmic radiation is enough to make a bit (of information) go crazy,”Stone explained.
According to him, in normal mode, Voyager transmits mostly scientific information at a very low speed - 160 bits per second. Now the probe sends data to the Earth almost around the clock, and NASA "catches" signals for ten hours a day.
Meanwhile, a German scientist quite seriously offered the most incredible, but also the most obvious explanation for UFO lovers: the probe was captured by aliens and are now trying to communicate with the Earth through it.
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Academician Hartwig Hausdorff told the newspaper Bild, to which the British The Daily Telegraph refers: "It looks like someone reprogrammed or captured the probe - we still do not know the whole truth."
He bases his version on the fact that all Voyager 2 systems in general are functioning absolutely normally - except that the data transmitter has "gone crazy".
Recall that the probe spontaneously switched to a different transmission format in April this year. And if earlier Voyager 2 transmitted scientific information mainly at a very low speed - 160 bits per second, now it sends data to Earth almost around the clock, and NASA catches signals for ten hours a day.
At the same time, employees of the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena (California) are unable to decipher them.
Lab spokesman Ed Stone previously suggested the problem was solvable. “Memory instability is akin to the memory of personal computers at boot time. An accidental hit of even one particle of cosmic radiation is enough to make a bit (of information) go crazy,”he explained.
Note that for fans of space fiction, and just for people who are interested, the diligent attempts of scientists to discard all versions associated with alien intelligence as far as possible may seem strange. The fact is that the twin probes Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were actually sent in search of him. They contain messages to extraterrestrial civilizations, namely gold-plated discs with basic data about our planet, presented in sounds and images.
Human speech is represented by short greetings in 55 languages, a mother's whisper, a child's cry; nature - with the voices of birds and animals, the sound of the surf, wind and rain, thunder, and the roar of volcanoes. The discs also contain fragments of works by Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, jazz compositions by Louis Armstrong, Chuck Berry and folk music of many countries.
The probes were launched by NASA in 1977. The original purpose of their launch was to study Jupiter and Saturn, and they have indeed delivered high-quality images of these giant planets for the first time. The probes were supposed to cease to exist in 1981. But after completing the assigned tasks, they were sent to different parts of the heliosphere to study the most distant corners of the solar system.
Voyager 1, for the first time in the history of space flight, reached the outer limits of the solar system and is now the farthest and fastest-moving object created by man. Voyager 2 was the first and so far the only vehicle to reach Uranus and Neptune.
The probes are equipped with three nuclear generators designed to operate smoothly until 2020.
