NASA spacecraft suddenly starts transmitting mysterious 'gibberish' 15 billion miles from Earth

Spacecraft usually send clear data back to Earth, so when Voyager 1 started sending gibberish messages last November, it left scientists puzzled. In a recent breakthrough, NASA engineers finally deciphered what these strange signals meant.

According to the NASA website, the Voyager 1 has been exploring the solar system for more than 45 years. It is now in interstellar space, the region outside the heliopause, or the bubble of energetic particles and magnetic fields from the sun. It is the first spacecraft to cross the heliosphere. In March 2024, NASA engineers sent what is known as a "poke" to the probe to get information from the flight data subsystem (FDS). After it responded, they understood the problem and it was that the memory of the FDS had been corrupted.

A blog posted by NASA states that 3 percent of the FDS memory has been corrupted, preventing the computer from carrying out normal operations. They mentioned, “The team suspects that a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory isn’t working. Engineers can’t determine with certainty what caused the issue. Two possibilities are that the chip could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or that it simply may have worn out after 46 years.”

They went on to say that it might take weeks or months but the engineers are optimistic that they can find a way for the FDS to operate normally without the unusable memory hardware.  However, since its launch in 1977, the spacecraft has flown by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 has flown by Uranus and Neptune. Both the spacecraft are exploring interstellar space. Though there is an issue in Voyager 1, Voyager 2 has been working normally.

In other news, NASA was all set to launch three rockets to trace the path of the eclipse on April 8, 2024. The eclipse was said to be seen in various regions in North America for more than six hours. During this duration, the rockets were to "study how Earth’s upper atmosphere is affected when sunlight momentarily dims over a portion of the planet," according to NASA’s website. The rockets were to be launched at three different times, one 45 minutes before, next during the eclipse and the last one 45 minutes after the eclipse.

The time intervals of the launches are to collect data on how the Sun’s sudden disappearance affects the ionosphere or creates “potential disturbances” that can affect our communications. The launch would have taken place from NASA’s Wallops Flight Facility in Virginia. The rockets were earlier used during the annular solar eclipse in 2023, in Mexico and have been refurbished with new instruments to be launched in April 2024.

Editor's note: This article was originally published on April 16, 2024. It has since been updated.