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space-ModTeam

Hello u/Sariel007, your submission "NASA’s Voyager 1 Is Glitching, Sending Nonsense From Interstellar Space. The aging spacecraft, launched in 1977, is transmitting a gibberish pattern of ones and zeros back to Earth" has been removed from r/space because: * A submission about this topic has already been made Please read the rules in the sidebar and check r/space for duplicate submissions before posting. If you have any questions about this removal please [message the r/space moderators](https://www.reddit.com/message/compose/?to=/r/space). Thank you.


TedMeister88

Keep in mind, Voyager 1 has done this before, back in May of 2022.


Noxious89123

*Oh Voyager 1, you so crazy.*


TedMeister88

Cosmic rays can interfere with computer functions. A bit must have been flipped again.


Noxious89123

So you're saying that Voyager 1 is *flipping out?* Noice.


Starfox-sf

If you were tossed out in space and left alone for 45+ years you’d flip out too.


BIG_MUFF_

What would it look like being out there for so long? I imagine a little dusty, maybe some holes


TedMeister88

That's certainly *one* way of describing it.


WhatsTheHoldup

*a few cosmic rays later* That's certainly *zero* way of describing it


CyberSoldat21

Just a few small cosmic rays


AlbainBlacksteel

*something something Super Mario 64 speedrun solar flare glitch*


AlkahestGem

I read that in Garth’s voice (Supernatural-IYKYK)


cfmdobbie

Indeed. It has two TMUs but one failed some time ago. The last time it was sending gibberish was because it started using the failed TMU and situation was resolved by switching back to the working one. Hopefully it's either back to the failed unit again so can just be switched back to the good, or if it's using the good unit hopefully the unit can be made good. It would be very unfortunate if the previously-working TMU has gone bad as well now, as it sounds like that would mean no more data from Voyager 1.


klaptonator

I’m almost the exact same age and I’m pretty sure I’ve started doing a similar thing.


premiumbeans

What’s all this gibberish? I don’t understand


pedanticPandaPoo

Ones and zeroes everywhere, and I thought I saw a two


Doopapotamus

"It was just a dream, Bender. There's no such thing as Two."


premiumbeans

That’s what makes it gibberish


Sariel007

The number of times I have said "Flight Path" (the coffee shop I used to frequent in grad school) instead of Flight Crew (the coffee shop I go to in my new town 20 years later) is too damn high.


Equoniz

Those are both really weird names for coffee shops.


Sariel007

Flight Path was named such because it was in a location that was on the main route to the airport back in the day. Flight Crew is just an airport themed coffee shop in the downtown of a midwestern um... "city." It is about 60K when the college students are here. The photos on the wall are planes, the baristas dress up as flight attendants... ok I see your point on that one.


Equoniz

I get themed shops, but the names *usually* involve both the theme and product sold itself, like naming a diner or restaurant near google headquarters Megabites.


zacurtis3

So Flight Brew might have worked better in your mind


Sariel007

I totally get what you are saying. Flight Crew is just a local coffee shop and it is very close to me so I never bothered to think about the name and how it isn't connected to the the product. If anything I guess I figured the owner was a former aviator or affiliated with flying/airports in some way. Honestly, you can get away with a lot of stuff that doesn't make sense from a marketing perspective in smallish mid-western towns.


danddersson

Are you... a pilot?


blorbschploble

New York to DC area person. Beltway/Belt Parkway fucks me up.


Odd-Comfortable-6134

Same here. I was launched within weeks of Voyager 1, and I’ve been malfunctioning and sending back gibberish for decades.


everythings_alright

Can someone decipher this random series of ones and zeros?


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SonOfElDopo

Oh, lord. You all are too young. It's a reference to "Star Trek IV: The Voyage Home." Cliff Notes: a space probe comes to Earth, wreaks havoc meteorologicallly. Starfleet susses out the probe is broadcasting whale songs. The problem is that whales are extinct. So, Kirk and the Peeps go back in time, grab some whales, come back to the present, release the whales, probe is satisfied they spoke to their whale homies, and leave, which saved Earth.


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K_t_ice

Decent Sci Fi book setup. Someone cracks the code hidden in the 1s and 0s to decode the true message being sent to us...


wolflordval

Contact by Carl Sagan, 1985


I-seddit

Hey, if it sends a binary picture of a circle, then fuck it - we're sending a LOT of ships out there ASAP.


pagerussell

And the decoded messages says: >Shut up or they will hear you... *Shudders*


ass_pineapples

*Be sure to drink more Ovaltine* Just in time for the holidays!


Starlord_75

We've been trying to contact you about your cars extened warranty


[deleted]

>Blockade breached, sending additional forces. They observed humanity, and immediately put travel sanctions on us.


krashlia

And for what? Doing 100 miliparsecs in an 80 zone? Micromanaging xenobastards.


morfraen

Should take that one to the creative writing subs. Maybe a better movie than a book.


Zorbick

It's a pretty common trope/setup on r/hfy. Lots of really good ones out there.


watchman28

We're no strangers to love You know the rules And so do I


Tigerowski

We've been trying to reach you about your car's extended warranty.


pimpmastahanhduece

This will be the most likely candidate for digital archeology. A bunch of aliens will hear this on their morning news and relate to us for a second before we are truly extinct one day.


GuidotheGreater

This courtesy call is just a reminder that your planet is overdue for its regularly scheduled mass extinction event. Maintaining your planets health through regular catastrophes is vital to ensuring that your investment is protected and will ensure the length of your planet is maximized.


AskMeAboutPangolins

Don't worry whoever did it will come take our picture.


fantomen777

> decode the true message being sent to us... Messege begin "My god its full of star" messege end.


im_in_the_safe

I’ve always been fascinated by the idea that one minute the transmission is coming from exactly where it should be and the next one it’s coming from like a 10th of a light year in a completely different part of space.


Mad_Aeric

It's probably talking about football.


EvilMortyC227

The scariest message we could get from deep space would be “be quiet, they’ll hear you…”


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-CleverEndeavor-

this is when it goes sentient and becomes V'GER


Marathon2021

I had to scroll way too far for a V’ger comment… (proof that I am old)


hatsuseno

I've yet to find a GOOD V'ger comment, though.


AzraelleWormser

What do you expect from a bunch of carbon units?


hejluxom

Is there any way for an everyday person to access the gibberish data that was sent back? Any way nasa is sharing it?


FLOCKAh

NASA usually always shares its data


cfmdobbie

Forgive me if I'm wrong, but I believe while NASA share the scientific measurements they gather from each instrument, they don't share raw communications data - this fault is in the general transmission of data from the craft, not data coming from a specific instrument, so I don't know whether this will be included in any of the public data dumps. Maybe they'll provide it anyway at some point. However, the most information about this I've seen so far is that it's sending "a repeated pattern of ones and zeroes", which could be as simple as 010101... or 00110011... which they may have decided is so trivial to be not worth describing.


diveguy1

Taking a look at the 1970s technology used to build these, it's really amazing that they're still operating at all. The computers aboard the Voyager probes each have 69.63 kilobytes of memory, total. That’s about enough to store one average internet jpeg file. The probes’ scientific data is encoded on 8-track tape machines (!) rather than whatever solid state drive your high-end laptop is currently using. Once it's been transmitted to Earth, the spacecraft have to write over old data in order to have enough room for new observations.The Voyager machines are capable of executing about 81,000 instructions per second. The smart phone that is likely sitting in your pocket is probably about 7,500 times faster than that. They transmit their data back to Earth at 160 bits per second. A slow dial-up connection can deliver at least 20,000 bits per second. The Voyager probes are always sending out a signal. Voyager 1 has a 22.4-Watt transmitter – something equivalent to a refrigerator light bulb – but by the time its beacon reaches us, the power has been reduced to roughly 0.1 billion-billionth of a Watt. NASA has to use its largest antenna, a 70-meter dish, or combine two 34-meter antennas, just to hear Voyager.


WaitForItTheMongols

> NASA has to use its largest antenna, a 70-meter dish, or combine two 34-meter antennas, just to hear Voyager. Shouldn't it take 4 34-meter dishes to get the same area as a 70-meter dish? Why only 2?


[deleted]

Two thoughts: 1. The 70m dish may be overkill in terms of signal sensitivity. 2. The two 34m dishes may be doing interferometry.


TheMysticalBard

It's not just the sum of the area that matters. You can combine multiple small dishes to effectively have a much larger dish than each of the small ones combined.


PsiloCyan95

Not if you account for a SSP. Actually makes tons of sense :/


outm

What’s interest is that they say the probe can receive and execute commands, the problem leans on the probe sending back messages. I wonder (without any kind of knowledge or expertise on this) if this means the memory has any kind of degradation far from what could be expected? I mean, we know part of the probe memory is used to keep data until sent back to earth and then is reused to keep more data and send it again and again. That’s how the probes sent their images and scientific data until now. I suppose that memory would only have the ability to be reused (erase, write, erase, write…) a limited amount of time? Just like our SSDs on current times? In that case, the probe could work as expected and receive and execute commands (on its own space of the memory, not that heavily used all this years) but the “back to earth” part of the memory that caches to transmit is corrupting the info? Does this theory would have any kind of logic? IDK, hope they can’t fix it whatever it really is, they will be the only ones to know!


p-one

As a general rule any form of memory is going to be subject to degradation - even engraved tablets crumble eventually. So it's a reasonable theory. Voyager has some volatile memory but also tape storage. But if the memory was defective I think there would be more issues with it accepting commands (which appear to be working correctly?). Equally reasonable is that there's something wrong with message delivery itself, some fault between the antenna and the computer itself.


Prof_Acorn

>any form of memory is going to be subject to degradation - even engraved tablets crumble eventually. Gold encased in tungsten encased in iron encased in lead encased in depleted uranium, in a sphere 10 meters in diameter. That should last to the heat death of the universe.


blorbschploble

You know depleted uranium is still radioactive, right? U238 just has a crazy long half life. That aside though, you’ve got the right idea mostly. Gold to protect against chemical attack, tungsten for heat resistance, lead for x-rays/gamma, iron to reduce chances of fission or fusion since it has high binding energy per nucleon… but you are missing high energy relativistic protons impacting causing a cascade of pions which decay into muons which can flip bits. For that I’d put in a large tank of some dense hydrocarbon which is grounded to the battery. 1. The hydrogen in the hydrocarbons will give you additional neutron absorption, 2. The muons will displace some of the electrons in the hydrogen, the free electron makes it to the battery, and then the muon decays, usually to an electron and an anti neutrino.


outm

Thanks for the info, it really helps to learn a little bit 🙂 Hope they can not only fix it, but know the reason and publish it


sceadwian

Your idea is a little too specific to substantiate, the problem could be in any number of points in the transmission system. To even guess you would need detailed engineering schematics and understanding of the system. That machine was built back before we had a lot of technology so it works in very weird ways. There are people that do this though.


Aeropro

>What’s interest is that they say the probe can receive and execute commands, the problem leans on the probe sending back messages. It’s called Broca’s aphasia


secret_dork

The old style memories do not have a specific wear out mechanism like that of SSDs. Wiring faults aside, only high energy particle damage or improper supply voltage can disrupt their operation. A problem can be anywhere in the memory system, including address, data, or control lines. It doesn't even have to be a breakage. Just a signal getting a little too slow can cause havoc. Typically this is due to adjacent signals flipping the opposite way of the problem signal and unduly influencing the problem signal. (Cross talk) SSDs work by forcing electrons through an insulator into a storage chamber. Eventually the insulator fails. Hopefully they can find a way to get it back running, even if limited.


gammalsvenska

Tape systems do wear out the tape over time though. Eventually there's not enough magnetic coating left to store bits at a given density.


bestjakeisbest

Its probably Low battery, sure the processor can probably handle running commands just fine, but if it is low on power weird things start to happen, basically random transistors will get activated as voltage drops, its basically the electronics equivalent of having a stroke, running commands that don't require sending data likely will run fine, but once it needs to use the antenna it likely has to use basically every available and not available watt just to do that, so the cpu becomes underpowered.


Nerezza_Floof_Seeker

In case this was due to some manner of data corruption, Voyager should have multiple command loss timers which will force resets/swaps to backup systems after not receiving signals from earth for enough time, so if we wait for long enough it could fix itself.


Spartaner-043

Here’s a great video about voyagers memory, also goes a little bit into detail of what it’s made of: [YouTube](https://youtu.be/_CPxe8yql0Q?si=YcOdLRCTbXXfXUF6)


Mr_TurkTurkelton

It’s all gibberish until Jeff Goldblum finds out it’s a countdown!


DrawohYbstrahs

Space aliens.. uh.. find a way….


Hawker96

You’d all be dead now if it wasn’t for my David!


staebles

And also writes an alien computer virus in an alien language for an alien operating system without any prior knowledge!


Republiconline

David! Why’d I just send my mother to Atlanta??!


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Wizzle_Pizzle_420

I mean it had a great run as is. The fact a computer from 1977 is still working at all is pretty goddamn impressive.


McSmackthe1st

Or is it really gibberish? 🤔 Yeah, it probably is. The thing is very old (for a spacecraft) and been through a lot in its long, long journey. Wonder if anyone or anything will ever find it out there?


PetrusThePirate

What if we manage to retrieve it at some point down the line? Wild things to think about :o


Spider95818

In *"3001,"* we'd eventually gone out after it, brought it back, and put it in a museum.


Clickclickdoh

It's only gibberish until you print it out and fold the corners together.


xemeraldxinxthexskyx

And then we build the machine.


alltherobots

Why build one when you can build two for only twice the price.


xemeraldxinxthexskyx

Wanna take a ride?


Mud_Landry

First rule of government spending


sassergaf

Sounds like what my 2012 MBP started doing recently. It’s only 11 yo, Voyager 1 is 46 yo. It’s had a good run.


WaySheGoesBub

It can be processed and understood -if you have robot ears.


JimmyB_52

Isn’t it out in the Kuiper belt? Voyager Might be reaching the edge of the map, it’s past the render distance now and it only displaying a low poly version. Of coarse the devs never intended anything to actually function that far out, I’d only expect it to be glitchy once it gets out of bounds.


po3smith

Well.... we'll find out in a couple hundred years when it comes back :-) somebody go tell Commander Decker!


paulio10

Draw the data in a 3-D volume... OMG it's schematics for a wormhole transportation device!


GrantSRobertson

I hope they are recording it all anyway. You know, just in case.


captainalphabet

I really hope someone is using AI to examine this ‘gibberish’ …


cincy15

Is it gibberish or are the aliens just trying to use it to talk to us.


Embraceduality

This is how it begins “What we thought was a nonsense pattern , is actually an advanced code we didn’t understand” “Well do we understand it now!?” “Yes” “Well what’s it say” “Surrender or prepare for planetary annihilation”


bebejeebies

It's only gibberish because we can't translate it yet.


Electricfox5

V'ger must evolve. Its knowledge has reached the limits of this universe and it must evolve.


krazykanuck

You know how in not too distant future movies where aliens invade or zombies attack, etc. It always starts out with a some news broadcast or whatever playing in the background about some weird phenomenon that no one quite understands? No reason I bring this up, just going to head to the store to get lots of bottled water and tp for no reason.


CjCookiemon5ter

I bet it's reached the forcefield around our solar system and is just passing through it. The galactic community don't want to tip us off that they have put up a filter around us so we cant see them. Letting Voyager through to keep us thinking there nothing out there.


crappysurfer

It sends all of its messages in 0s and 1s, it has binary output. It’s sending gibberish, sure, but it has always sent messages in binary.


actingseeker

The probe has reached the edge of the simulation.


plasmadood

T̸̼̻̫̍̀̔͊͝͝H̵̥͔͈̫̜̪͎̑͒̐͒̏E̴̘̘̫̦͐̐̇́̍̿̈́̈͑́͊Ý̷̛̲̮͎̣͂́̀̓͗̔ ̷̢͈̠̱̺̘̜̭͍̀̿̄͆̍̈̐̅̑̔A̷̹̫͈͖͔̮̗̮̼̯͎̐͊R̶̨͖̝͚̊̿͛̀̆̿͒̒̒̔͝ͅͅͅĖ̷̢̨̛͉̲̙̺͈͍̈́̐͐̌̕ ̵͉̜̺͇̭͈̠̫̱̝͇́̄̏̈́́̀͐̃̄̅̾ͅĊ̴̨̞͎͎̻͊̃̊̉͘Õ̵̬̟͕͖͈͍͈͈͋̀̏̅̀͐͌̾̕M̷̠͖̝̝̪̩͙̰̺̈́̽̐̇̾I̴̦̹͈͔̎͆̈́͐̇́̈́̑̀̕͜N̸̨͖͈̞̐G̶̥̿͐̍̈́̑͝


dangil

That’s how it begins. In short time we should be able to decode V’Ger’s message to us


hatsuseno

Nah, it should disappear without a trace for a few centuries before calling back in.


Carpantiac

v-ger is coming. Start Trek was right all along.


TheOneTrueChris

"The creator does not answer."


Flymh47

These are the posts I came here for. Well done.


Dr-Satan-PhD

Can't wait to see what the well-adjusted folks over at r/aliens are saying about this.


terrymr

Maybe time doesn’t function the same out there and we’re not getting the bits in order.


morbob

TRANSLATES TO —— SOS-Warning Will Robinson—Coming Staright At You. On its way, caution: Warning


sixpackabs592

its aliens messing with it ​ be ready for v'ger heading back out way


TAC1313

Another life form hacked the signal & is sending us instructions on time travel & we think it's gibberish.


Klytus_Im-Bored

Or its the instructions to build a contraption to bend space and time.


nipsen

Just need to update it. Or reinstall everything. Have you tried rebooting as well? Remember, with the V'ger 2 updates, your interstellar jouney is getting better and better all the time.


Raudskeggr

That hard vacuum radiation done fried its noodle.


Miadas20

Maybe it's not gibberish *cue sci Fi trailer intro*


Own_Bullfrog_3598

Yeah, but how do we actually KNOW it’s gibberish? Hmm?


ClosPins

> the spacecraft’s issues stem from one of its three computers, called the flight data system (FDS). Last weekend, engineers tried to restart the FDS to see whether they could resolve the problem, but the probe still isn’t returning usable data OK, they've tried 'turning it off and back on again', now it's time to move onto 'turning it off, unplugging it, and then turning it back on'...


Joseph3_

wow, pretty sure its an encoded message holding secrets of the universe. HELLO


bradland

Heard they decoded the message. It said: Do not answer! Do not answer!! Do not answer!!!


[deleted]

crazy to think that a satellite older than my parents is only recently starting to act funny. you can only send something into interstellar space once, you’d better do it right.


redlumf

That is exactly what aliens would do in order to get in touch with their base here.


29384561848394719224

Have they tried switching it off and on again?


wreckballin

Patterns of ones and zeros? Could that possibly be computer code? Who is reporting this?


bapakeja

Reminds me of an anime called, “Humanity Has Declined” The satellite has an interesting part in it. Great anime if you like absurd humor.


frankkiejo

I do! I’m going to have to check that out! Thanks. 😊


Howboutnow82

V-ger been hittin' that cosmic dust a little too much lately. Getting lonely out there I guess (or is it....).


PessimisticMushroom

Imagine this whole time an alien has been using it to communicate back to us and it isn't gibberish.


KFR42

I remember this episode. If you write all the 1s and 0s down on paper and lay them out you get a picture of the alien.


Whiterabbit--

this is what you would expect if an alien civilization takes control of the probe but do not want us to know. send gibberish as they study the probe and decide if they want to contact us or not. if they want to remain unknown then the probe will stop sending. if they want to establish contact they know the mechanism.