It was amazing! This NASA spacecraft, which was shut down for 43 years, has restarted, but why has it become an unsolved puzzle for scientists?
science news desk – American space agency NASA has re-established contact with a 47-year-old satellite in space. This contact has been established with the Voyager-1 spacecraft, which is the longest mission in America’s space history. In 1977, NASA launched the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft at an interval of a few weeks. Accordingly, he has been working for about 47 years. According to a VOA report, in recent years NASA was facing difficulties in establishing contact with the Voyager spacecraft. In April this year, NASA had said that it was not able to contact the ‘Voyager 1’ spacecraft for 5 months.
Scientists could not understand what the spacecraft was saying
According to the report, NASA officials said that a chip in the onboard computer of ‘Voyager 1’ had malfunctioned. Because of this, scientists were not able to understand the data that the spacecraft was sending. However, scientists changed the method of reading and the problem was fixed to some extent. After this, communication related problems came up again in October. Because of this, scientists were getting the data of ‘Voyager 1’ late. That problem was related to the spacecraft’s radio transmitter system. After this, when for some reason NASA asked the spacecraft to turn on one of its heaters, Voyager 1’s fault protection system got activated. Its purpose was to save electricity. In such a situation, the spacecraft started sending signals in a different way instead of the radio signals usually sent.
This was the situation when NASA started receiving signals on S-band instead of the normal X-band. The spacecraft began delivering data again when NASA began receiving them. NASA says that S-band is much weaker than X-band, so they were trying to introduce X-band radio communication system for a long time. Interestingly, NASA has not used S-band since 1981. This means that the agency has received signals differently from Voyager 1 43 years later. The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft were designed to explore Jupiter and Saturn. Both spacecraft performed their tasks very well. Voyager 2 even came close to Uranus and Neptune in 1989.
