What happened?After flying 24 billion kilometers in 46 years, Voyager 1 lost contact and sent back a

Mondo Science Updated on 2024-01-29

Humans are one of the more amazing species, rising millions of years ago on the African continent, and are very young compared to most species on Earth.

But it is this kind of creature that developed an intelligent civilization and finally stood at the top of the food chain, the earth can no longer restrain our curiosity, from the middle of the last century began to carry out space exploration in the true sense, sending probes to fly out of the earth, astronauts into space, and the farthest footprint of human beings has been imprinted to the moon 380,000 kilometers away!

Human curiosity is realized by launching probes, the inner solar system is already familiar to us, and the outer solar system is still a mystery, the launch of Voyager 1 is to go to the outer solar system, and even eventually fly out of the solar system!

In September 1977, Voyager 1 successfully departed from Earth, initially aiming for four perihelion planets, but when passing Jupiter and Saturn, it made a special targeted exploration of their moons, missed the opportunity to explore Uranus and Neptune, and finally went directly to the outer solar system with human expectations. Based on Voyager 1's current flight speed and bearing, its target is 4Proxima Centauri, 22 light-years away, is also the closest star to us.

But Voyager 1 is too slow, with an average speed of only 17 kilometers per second, and it takes about 170,000 years.

Although Voyager 1 is nuclear-powered, it is mainly composed of three radioisotope thermoelectric generators, each of which stores 24 plutonium-238 oxide balls, which can produce 470 watts of electricity, but the plutonium-238 half-life is 877 years, which also means that its energy is limited after all, according to the plan it will lose contact with the Earth in 2025, when it will go to the deep space of the universe alone, with information about humans and the solar system to the unknown!

The road ahead is full of unknowns, and Voyager 1 will face a world that human civilization knows nothing about.

Voyager 1, launched in 1977, has been flying for 46 years and is about 24 billion kilometers from Earth, and it takes 45 hours of round-trip communication between it and the ground control room at such a distance, which means that it takes 22 hours to send a message from the ground5 hours for the detector to receive the information!Sending information to the ground again, it still takes 225 hours!

Voyager 1 was created more than half a century ago, and it needed to use its three on-board computers to send relevant information back to Earth in binary!

According to the information report on NASA's official website, Voyager 1 has been sending a large number of garbled codes to Earth since November 14, all of which are repeated "1" and "0"** Translated into no practical meaning, what happened to Voyager 1?

You must know that this probe is 24 billion kilometers away from us, although it does not give the solar system, but it has entered interstellar space, where the environment is unknown to human civilization, and the ultimate ideal state of Voyager 1 is to be captured by alien civilization, so that it can crack the metal record it carries.

Scientists believe that the gold disc carried by Voyager 1 is an opportunity to communicate with extraterrestrial life!Could it be that Voyager 1 has not yet flown out of the solar system?If there really is a day, what is the situation of human civilization, perhaps as Hawking once warned mankind, we cannot judge the quality of extraterrestrial civilizations, so it is said that encountering extraterrestrial civilizations is both an opportunity and a disaster!

Of course, Voyager 1's current state is not like this, and it is likely to be a wake-up call that it will soon lose contact with Earth. The previous ideal estimate was that it would lose contact with the Earth around 2025.

Now this date may have to come earlier, NASA's scientific team in charge of Voyager 1 said that at present, Voyager 1 can receive information from the ground normally and can also act according to instructions, but it cannot send useful information back to Earth!

In addition to the fact that conventional information cannot be deciphered, even the engineering data describing the health and status of the probe itself is currently chaotic!

If we're lucky, scientists may only need a few weeks to fix the problem of missing Voyager 1, but there are concerns that Voyager 1's garbled code is related to the aging of its own equipment or lack of energy. Voyager 2 had a similar problem before, losing contact with the ground for a long time, but it was eventually resolved, and we believe that Voyager 1 was in a similar situation.

But we have to accept the fact that these two historical probes, the distant messengers of mankind, will lose contact with the ground one day, and maybe extraterrestrial life will return to their home planet with them a long, long time later, but their experience may never be known to mankind!

The ideal state will be lost around 2025, and the unideal state is likely to be today or tomorrow, but at least there is a hope and an opportunity, which is also the first cry of human civilization to the deep space of the universe, who will hear it?

Black hole in the liberal arts, ** network invasion and deletion.

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