NASA has had no news from Voyager 1 for a week. The spacecraft is untraceable in interstellar space

After 47 years moving away from Earth, the Voyager 1 spacecraft is untraceable. NASA has had no news from the mythical space probe for a week, but its antennas continue listening in the hope that it will appear soon.

A week without hearing from Voyager 1. Neither NASA nor mission controllers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have made any statements on the matter, but something is not right with Voyager 1.

Bernard Netherclift, a Voyager enthusiast who closely follows the Deep Space Network communications (DSN) with the probes, revealed that NASA antennas located in Robledo de Chavela (Madrid), Tidbinbilla (Canberra) and Goldstone (California), stopped receiving signals from Voyager 1 last week.

First recovery attempt. At 24.7 billion kilometers from Earth, Voyager 1 is the furthest human-made object from our planet. That’s them about 23 light hoursso it takes an entire day for NASA communications to go from Earth to Voyager and back.

Although NASA can align the six antennas of Madrid to receive the weak signal from Voyager 1, the Canberra station is the only one that has a high power transmitter capable of covering such a large distance, which is why JPL has made three decisions to attack the crisis:

1. Reassign part of the Voyager 2 tracking time to the search for Voyager 1 from Canberra station
2. Deprioritize communications with ESA’s XMM-Newton observatory and NOAA’s DSCOVR meteorological satellite so that Canberra and also Madrid they can spend more time searching for Voyager 1
3. Send a 100 KW transmission from the DSN’s most powerful antenna, the 70-meter diameter one in Canberra. It is the first attempt to recover Voyager 1, the result of which we will know in the next few hours

What is happening. Without official statements from NASA, it’s hard to know. Voyager 1, launched on September 5, 1977, has suffered several anomalies in recent months, which JPL engineers have been heroically solving by fighting against the abysmal distance, limited energy and ancient software of the probe.

Recent problems. Between November 2023 and May 2024, Voyager 1 stopped sending scientific data due to a damaged memory chip. After locating the problem, NASA engineers managed to relocate the code to other parts of the spacecraft’s scarce memory and recover communications.

More recently, mission controllers had to restart engines that had been inactive for decades in order to orient the ship. The fuel tubes Voyager 1 was using had become clogged by an aging rubber diaphragm, and the probe was at risk of its antennas no longer being able to look in the direction of Earth.

The worst case scenario. If the thrusters that Voyager 1 was now using have also failed and the probe has become misoriented, it may not be possible to recover. Commands to correct any problems would not reach you.

If it were a failure of the instruments, there would be hope of recovering it. Voyager 1’s power source is a radioisotope thermoelectric generator (RTG) that, although it produces less energy each year due to the natural decay of plutonium-238, still has energy to continue operating until 2030.

And now what. NASA just sent a blind transmission to Voyager 1, which probably means that it has been looking at the latest telemetry received to write some commands in the hope that they will reach the probe and resume communications.

If it doesn’t appear after this, it may be the end of one of the most legendary missions in space exploration. With permission from Voyager 2, which continues to function and also has energy left in its RTG to continue collecting data from interstellar space until 2030.

Image | POT

In Xataka | NASA has managed to get Voyager 1 to start some engines that have been dormant for decades. It was that or lose the ship.