A team of engineers on NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is studying telemetry from the interstellar probe. It works
AACS controls the orientation of a 45-year-oldspaceship. Among other tasks, the system keeps Voyager 1's antenna pointed precisely toward Earth. So far it is fulfilling its main function. Without this, communication with the probe will immediately stop. However, the telemetry data it sends is not valid. For example, it may appear to be randomly generated or not reflective of any possible state the AACS may be in.
It is currently unclear what is causingproblem and whether it can be fixed. So far it has not triggered any on-board failure protection systems. They are designed to put the spacecraft into a “safe mode,” a state in which only basic operations are performed, giving engineers time to diagnose the problem. Voyager 1's signal also did not weaken, indicating that the high-gain antenna remained in the prescribed orientation relative to Earth.
The team will continue to closely monitorsignal while continuing to determine if bad data is coming directly from AACS or another system involved in creating and sending telemetry data.
Voyager 1 is currently located at a distance of 23.3billion km from Earth or 20 hours and 33 light minutes from us. This means it takes approximately two days to send a message to Voyager 1 and receive a response. However, as noted by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, the mission team is already accustomed to this delay.
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