NASA scientists amazed after solving the mystery of gibberish sound coming from space

Since September 1977, NASA’s spearheading spacecraft “Voyager 1” has zipped past Jupiter and Saturn. It has enabled scientists to study the weather, magnetic fields, and rings of these two gas planets. It was also the first probe to provide detailed images of these planets' moons. However, since November 2023, the spacecraft started experiencing a glitch. Its communication systems appeared to become somewhat debilitated for the engineers.

Since November, Voyager 1 has been sending a stream of garbled data in the radio signals, which proved to be useless and unreadable by the scientists working on the mission. Scientists were bumfuzzled thinking about what could be causing this sudden glitch in the spacecraft. 

In early March, NASA engineers sent a command prompt, or "poke," to the 46-year-old craft to get a readout from its flight data subsystem (FDS) which packages Voyager 1's science and engineering data before sending it back to Earth. After decoding the spacecraft's response, the engineers concluded in a statement the actual fault that was causing the glitch. They found that a chip in the FDS's memory was corrupted, due to which it was unable to use its telemetry modulation unit; the reason why it was sending all the gobbledygook in the form of jumbles of 1s and 0s.

Engineers however have no idea how this chip became corrupted. There are two possibilities, they say; either the chip could have been hit by an energetic particle from space or it may have worn out after over four decades since the spacecraft was launched. The engineers add that it may take several months for the chip to repair, but the craft’s ability to send readable data has been restored.

Voyager 1 was launched as part of the Voyager program to study the outer Solar System and the interstellar space beyond the Sun's heliosphere. It communicates real-time distance and velocity data to NASA scientists, from distant space. Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to cross the heliopause and enter interstellar space on August 25, 2012.

The Voyager 1 craft is sophisticatedly designed with three-axis stabilized systems that use celestial or gyro-referenced attitude control to maintain the pointing of the high-gain antennas toward Earth. The system is equipped with a command computer subsystem (CCS), an Attitude and Articulation Control Subsystem (AACS), an X-band transmitter, and three Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs).

Both Voyager 1 and its sister craft Voyager 2 are propped up with greetings from Earth, should it encounter any lifeforms in outer space. The greetings are packed in a phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.

The majestic spacecraft is currently more than 15 billion miles from Earth, and it takes approximately 22.5 hours for any radio signal to travel from the space capsule to Earth, communicating some data to the engineers. NASA broadcasts the real-time and updated status of this mission on its NASA “Eyes on the Solar System” app.