NASA issued a note last week that left many intrigued, possibly worried, by the Voyager-1 spacecraft, the most distant object ever launched by humanity. And what is most distressing is not what the American space agency said, but what it left unsaid: Voyager, poor thing, is going gaga.
Well, spaceships, even if equipped with long-lived plutonium batteries and designed to survive in the hostile environment of the vacuum of space, taking massive doses of cosmic rays, also age. The most common for them, by the way, is for the body to succumb before the mind.
Take the example of InSight, a probe that descended on the Martian surface in 2018. It is currently in the natural process of dying from dust accumulation on solar panels. Everything on board works in principle, but without enough power, it should end up shutting down in the next few months – unless a “medical” intervention, in the form of a wind capable of blowing some of the dust off the panels, saves it.
Voyager-1 is also succumbing to the natural aging process from lack of electricity. Your plutonium pile generates less and less energy, which means you have to ration. Some instruments, such as cameras (useless 23.3 billion kilometers from Earth, where it is now), have long since been deactivated. Others, such as the meters of the radiation environment (which, by the way, were the ones that indicated that the spacecraft, in 2012, left the magnetic bubble in which the solar wind predominates over that of neighboring stars), remain firm and strong. Launched in 1977, it is old, but productive.
The newest detected anomaly comes into play. The telemetry sent to Earth says that the attitude control system (which determines the spacecraft’s orientation) is all out of joint. However, if that were the case, we wouldn’t even have this information, because Voyager-1 would have shifted its main antenna’s point to a direction other than Earth. In that, we would lose the signal.
In other words, what the on-board computer, the probe’s electronic mind, is telling us about this system does not correspond to reality. That is, the diagnosis made with telemetry indicates signs of senility.
So far, this issue has not triggered any of the probe’s emergency systems, such as entering “safe mode”. It may never happen and it’s going to be okay. It could also prove to be an increasingly complicated crisis, possibly irrecoverable in the future. We do not know.
Anyway, the battery is dead. The team hopes to achieve this by gathering scientific data beyond 2025 and perhaps only keeping telemetry contact beyond 2030. But one way or another, after a glorious journey, Voyager-1’s mission is coming to an end. Not suddenly, but slowly fading, like so many of us who live for longevity.
This column is published on Mondays, in Folha Corrida.
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