Monday, December 09, 2024
Thursday, December 05, 2024
Friday, November 29, 2024
Wednesday, November 27, 2024
Sunday, November 24, 2024
NASA astronauts are stuck in space over the holidays. He knows their pain. - The Washington Post
Two astronauts are stuck in space. This NASA veteran knows their pain.
"Frank Rubio lived in the International Space Station for more than a year after a spacecraft malfunctioned, missing holidays and family milestones.
Frank Rubio winces when he discusses the emotional hardship of being confined for more than in a year in a vessel orbiting Earth, the slightest of breaks in the composure of someone trained as doctor, Army helicopter pilot and NASA astronaut.
A leaking radiator on the Russian spacecraft that brought him to the International Space Station in 2022 extended Rubio’s time there from a planned six months to more than a year. When his son graduated from high school, and throughout his oldest daughter’s first year at college, he wasn’t on this planet. He had deployed to war zones before, but this felt different.
“There’s a little bit of disappointment in knowing you miss those things as a father,” Rubio said. While constantly battling monotony and the effects of space on his body, he made doaround the holidays with NASA’s prepackaged duck confit while his family celebrated Thanksgiving and Christmas on Earth.
Rubio’s experience — leave Earth in one vehicle, return much later in another — gives him an intimate understanding of the prolonged ordeal of two other NASA astronauts currently aboard the space station. Barry “Butch” Wilmore and Sunita “Suni” Williams had the job of testing out Boeing’s Starliner capsule, a new spacecraft that the aerospace company built for NASA. For them, too, technical problems dictated a change of plans.
Starliner successfully delivered them to the space station, but helium leaks and malfunctioning thrusters gave NASA pause about using it to bring them home. A planned eight-day mission grew to more than eight months. NASA decided to keep them there until February 2025, when a SpaceX Dragon spacecraft will have two free seats on a return trip.
The agency has so far declined to recertify Starliner for another flight. It is still investigating what caused Starliner’s flight problems, and it plans to later start testing and analyzing “potential upgrades and improvements” to the spacecraft’s systems, including its propulsion system, NASA public affairs officer Jimi Russell said on Nov. 8. At that point the Starliner team will “work to complete its understanding of system certification and later determine the schedule for changes,” Russell said.
Boeing, which has lost more than a billion dollars on the project, is considering selling Starliner, according to people familiar with the matter. Jeff Bezos’s Blue Origin is seen as one possible buyer. (Bezos owns The Washington Post)
Even with the change of plans, Wilmore’s and Williams’s extended time don’t register among the longest stays on the space station. Rubio’s “mission extension,” as NASA prefers to call it, made him the American record-holder for longest spaceflight, at 371 days. His stay pales in comparison to that of Russian cosmonaut Valery Polyakov, who spent 437 days on the space station in the mid-1990s.
NASA and its astronauts have emphasized that their training programs involve extensively rehearsing ways the mission can go wrong. Many of the astronauts are drawn from the military, and they go in with a realization of the risks involved. But a change of plans can still be hard, Rubio says.
“I think it’s important to acknowledge it’s not the ideal situation,” Rubio said of the Starliner crew’s situation. “We’re all humans, we all have expectations that kind of set the tone for things. So when you’re expecting an eight- to 15-day mission, and you get the news that it’s going to be longer, it’s always going to be a little bit hard, mostly for personal reasons.”
Life in orbit
Space is hard on the body, and hard on the mind. It is, as Rubio puts it, “the most prohibitive environment humans have ever operated in.”
People living in zero-gravity often experience piercing headaches. So-called “fluid shift” within their bodies can bring on congestion and cause some body parts to swell. They exercise at least two hours every day on resistance machines that simulate gravity, and follow a meticulous lifestyle meant to stave off the bodily decline that would otherwise set in during the first months in space.
And then there’s the monotony. Astronauts dwell in what amounts to 13,700 cubic feet of interconnected hallways, typically no more than six feet tall or wide. The breathtaking photography sent back to Earth is mostly from one small room, known as the cupola, and astronauts spend relatively little time there.
“You have the most incredible view of the Earth, and yet you’re still somewhat limited to the same surroundings every day, which is basically walls of computers, walls of cables,” Rubio said. “You only get to look out the cupola for a few minutes a day … so the monotony is something that you fight. You almost just block out the fact that it is repetitive and it is monotonous, because it is your job.”
Rubio, a West Point graduate who served as an Army helicopter pilot before attending medical school and entering NASA’s astronaut training program, said he tried to remind himself of the “incredible privilege” of being in space. The related hardship is not as bad as what many service members experience, he said, citing the example of a military prisoner of war.
“It’s hard to feel sorry for yourself if you think about those situations,” Rubio said.
The 48-year-old is still a NASA astronaut at Johnson Space Center in Houston, and has said he hopes to return to space again one day.
Some see a silver lining in keeping the astronauts in space longer. While NASA is prioritizing returning astronauts to the moon, SpaceX founder Elon Musk said he wants to send astronauts to Mars aboard a SpaceX Starship spacecraft in 2028. Such a mission, if it ever took place, would stretch the limits of humans’ time in zero-gravity.
“Longer experience in space is very helpful for finding out what’s going to be involved in potentially a Mars mission, where clearly you’re going to be up there a long time,” said Norman Augustine, a former Lockheed Martin CEO who has led three departmentwide evaluations of NASA.
In some ways, the space station is the laboratory for an ongoing, decades-long medical study. Details of an astronaut’s time in space contribute to an understanding of how the human body endures zero-gravity living over long periods. “For the next couple decades each person that goes up there is going to matter towards that data collection,” Rubio said.
Williams and Wilmore have aided in more than 60 scientific studies in their first six months aboard the space station, NASA said. Williams contributed to the first metal 3D print created aboard the space station, and they both worked on a method for watering and aerating plants grown in reduced-gravity, NASA said.
What’s next for human spaceflight?
Without Boeing’s Starliner, NASA has two options for getting its astronauts to and from the space station. They can tag along on a Russian Soyuz spacecraft, or rely on SpaceX’s Dragon capsule. Analysts say the agency is desperate to have a second American spacecraft to get astronauts to and from the space station, but it’s unclear whether Boeing’s Starliner will ever fully carry out that mission. NASA and Boeing still haven’t released any information on what may have caused the helium leaks and thruster problems.
The International Space Station has already been extended more than 10 years beyond what was initially planned, with hundreds of spare parts operating beyond their usable lifespan and air leaking from the Russian side. Unless it is extended again, it will be decommissioned in 2031, with NASA hoping to move toward a commercially operated space station after that.
Williams and Wilmore, their hair floating upward in a September live stream from the space station, said they don’t blame Boeing for the technical problems that prevented their return on the same spacecraft. Any test flight would be expected to encounter unexpected problems, Wilmore said.
Wilmore will be in space through much of his older daughter’s sophomore year at East Texas Baptist University, as well as most of his youngest daughter’s senior year in high school. Asked about the extra time away from his family, he expressed gratitude that the experience would give them a unique opportunity to grow as people, and answered a Fox News reporter’s question by referring to a Bible verse.
Williams said space is her “happy place.” This is well understood by her husband, mother and close friends, she said. She also misses her two dogs.
As for how family handled the change of plans: “We’re both Navy, we’ve both been on deployments, we’re not surprised when deployments get changed … our families are used to that as well.”
Saturday, November 23, 2024
Wednesday, November 20, 2024
How Google Spent 15 Years Creating a Culture of Concealment
How Google Spent 15 Years Creating a Culture of Concealment
“Trying to avoid antitrust suits, Google systematically told employees to destroy messages, avoid certain words and copy the lawyers as often as possible.
In late 2008, as Google faced antitrust scrutiny over an advertising deal with its rival Yahoo and confronted lawsuits involving patent, trademark and copyright claims, its executives sent out a confidential memo.
“We believe that information is good,” the executives told employees in the memo. But, they added, government regulators or competitors might seize on words that Google workers casually, thoughtlessly wrote to one another.
To minimize the odds that a lawsuit could flush out comments that might be incriminating, Google said, employees should refrain from speculation and sarcasm and “think twice” before writing one another about “hot topics.” “Don’t comment before you have all the facts,” they were instructed.
The technology was tweaked, too. The setting for the company’s instant messaging tool was changed to “off the record.” An incautious phrase would be wiped the next day.
The memo became the first salvo in a 15-year campaign by Google to make deletion the default in its internal communications. Even as the internet giant stored the world’s information, it created an office culture that tried to minimize its own. Among its tools: using legal privilege as an all-purpose shield and imposing restraints on its own technology, all while continually warning that loose lips could sink even the most successful corporation.
How Google developed this distrustful culture was pieced together from hundreds of documents and exhibits, as well as witness testimony, in three antitrust trials against the Silicon Valley company over the last year. The plaintiffs — Epic Games in one case, the Department of Justice in the other two — were trying to establish monopoly behavior, which required them to look through emails, memos and instant messages from hundreds of Google engineers and executives.
The exhibits and testimony showed that Google took numerous steps to keep a lid on internal communications. It encouraged employees to put “attorney-client privileged” on documents and to always add a Google lawyer to the list of recipients, even if no legal questions were involved and the lawyer never responded.
Companies anticipating litigation are required to preserve documents. But Google exempted instant messaging from automatic legal holds. If workers were involved in a lawsuit, it was up to them to turn their chat history on. From the evidence in the trials, few did.
Google is far from the only company trying to keep newer forms of communication out of the courtroom. As instant messages and text messages have become popular office tools, corporations and regulators have increasingly clashed over how the missives can be used in court.
A generation ago, a water-cooler conversation or a phone call might have been incriminating, but the words would have dissolved in the air. Someone might remember them, but they could always be denied. Perhaps listeners misheard or misunderstood.
Companies would like instant messages to be as ephemeral as a real-life conversation. A comment made by text to a subordinate about the implications of a merger is just so much chatter, they argue. But regulators, and litigants, see them as fair game.
In August, the Federal Trade Commission, which is suing to stop a $25 billion supermarket merger between Albertsons and Kroger, said several Albertsons executives had demonstrated “a pervasive practice” of deleting business-related text messages in defiance of legal requirements to keep them.
Some of these texts, the F.T.C. argued, suggested that at least one executive thought prices might increase as a result of the merger. The judge said Albertsons “failed to take reasonable steps” to preserve the messages, but did not punish the chain. Albertsons declined to comment.
In April, the F.T.C. said in a legal filing as part of its antitrust case against Amazonthat company executives had used the disappearing message tool Signal to discuss competition issues, even after they were required to keep all communications in the case. Amazon said the assertions that it had destroyed information were “baseless and irresponsible.”
But Google has faced the broadest criticism for its actions, with the judges in all three antitrust cases chastising the company for its communications practices.
Judge James Donato of the U.S. District Court for the Northern District of California, who presided over the Epic case, said that there was “an ingrained systemic culture of suppression of relevant evidence within Google” and that the company’s behavior was “a frontal assault on the fair administration of justice.” He added that after the trial, he was “going to get to the bottom” of who was responsible at Google for allowing this behavior. Judge Donato declined to comment.
Judge Leonie Brinkema of the U.S. District Court for the Eastern District of Virginia, who is overseeing Google’s antitrust case involving advertising technology, said at a hearing in August that the company’s document retention policies were “not the way in which a responsible corporate entity should function.” She added, “An awful lot of evidence has likely been destroyed.”
The Justice Department has asked Judge Brinkema for sanctions, which would be a presumption that the missing material was unfavorable to Google on the issues it is on trial for, including monopoly power and whether its conduct was anticompetitive. Closing arguments in the case are scheduled for Monday.
In a statement, Google said it took “seriously our obligations to preserve and produce relevant documents. We have for years responded to inquiries and litigation, and we educate our employees about legal privilege.”
From Google’s point of view, it was the Marie Kondo of corporations, merely tidying up its records and files. But it did this so comprehensively and obsessively that it created the illusion of deceit that it was trying so hard to dispel, said Agnieszka McPeak, a professor at Gonzaga University School of Law who has written about evidence destruction.
“Google had a top-down corporate policy of ‘Don’t save anything that could possibly make us look bad,’” she said. “And that makes Google look bad. If they’ve got nothing to hide, people think, why are they acting like they do?”
Microsoft’s Long Shadow
Google was founded in September 1998, a few months after the era’s most dominant tech company — Microsoft — was sued by the Justice Department for antitrust violations. Seeking to show that Microsoft was illegally monopolizing the web browser market, the department did not have to look far for damning memos.
“We need to continue our jihad next year,” a company vice president wrote to Microsoft’s chief executive, Bill Gates, in one memo. Another executive, trying to persuade Apple to kill a feature, said, “We want you to knife the baby.”
Microsoft lost the case, though the verdict was partly overturned on appeal. Still, it was enough of a near-death experience to make the next generation of tech companies, including Google, wary of both documents and loose comments.
The trouble was, technology made it so very easy to produce and preserve an abundance of both. Google produced 13 times as many emails as the average company per employee did before it was a decade old, Kent Walker, Google’s top lawyer, testified in the Epic trial. Google felt overwhelmed, he said, and it was clear to the company that things would only become worse if changes weren’t made.
The 2008 memo that said chat messages would be automatically purged was signed by Mr. Walker and Bill Coughran, an engineering executive. They noted that Google had “an email and instant messaging culture.” Its instant messaging tools, first called Talk, later Hangouts and then Chat, were quickly taken up by employees.
Chat was where engineers could go a little wild, safely. As one Googler wrote in a chat that surfaced as a courtroom exhibit, the need to be cautious “makes for less interesting, sometimes even less useful written communication. But that’s why we have off-the-record chats.”
Google, like many corporations, deals with so many lawsuits that some employees are subject to multiple litigation holds at the same time. A few may be on litigation holds for their entire career.
Lauren Moskowitz, an Epic lawyer, asked Mr. Walker during his testimony in the case how putting employees in control of the process actually worked.
“You expected your employees, hundreds, thousands of employees, to stop what they were doing for every instant message that they ever sent or received every day, and parse through a list of topics on some legal hold, to decide whether they should take an action to change a default setting in their Chat before conducting the rest of their business,” Ms. Moskowitz said.
Mr. Walker responded that the policy had been “reasonable at the time.”
As Google became bigger, its vocabulary became smaller. In a memo from 2011 titled “Antitrust Basics for Search Team,” the company recommended avoiding “metaphors involving wars or sports, winning or losing,” and rejecting references to “markets,” “market share” or “dominance.”
In a subsequent tutorial for new employees, Google said even a phrase as benign as “putting products in the hands of new customers” should be avoided because it “can be interpreted as expressing an intent to deny consumers choice.”
If using the right words and deleting messages did not keep Google out of the courthouse, the company concluded, invoking the lawyers would.
In the Epic case, the plaintiff contended that Google’s many evocations of attorney-client privilege were merely for show, to keep the documents out of the courtroom. Sundar Pichai, Google’s chief executive, wrote in one 2018 email to another executive, “Attorney Client Privileged, Confidential, Kent pls advice,” referring to Mr. Walker. The email, about a nonlegal issue, was withheld by Google and stripped of its privilege only after Epic challenged it.
Mr. Walker was asked to explain Google’s behavior to the judge. He denied that there was “a culture of concealment” but said one problem was Googlers unsure of the meaning of certain words.
“They think of the word ‘privilege’ as similar to ‘confidential,’” he said.
A message surfaced in the Epic trial in which a Google lawyer identified the practice of copying lawyers on documents as “fake privilege” and seemed rather amused by it. Mr. Walker said he was “disappointed” and “surprised” to hear that term.
The jury hearing the case ruled in favor of Epic on all 11 counts in December.
Mr. Pichai and Mr. Walker declined to comment. Last month, three advocacy groups, led by the American Economic Liberties Project, asked for Mr. Walker to be investigated by the California State Bar for coaching Google to “engage in widespread and illegal destruction” of documents relevant to federal trials.
‘What Happens in Vegas’
In September 2023, as Google went on trial in an antitrust case over its dominance in internet search, the Justice Department asserted that the company had withheld tens of thousands of documents, saying they were privileged. When the documents were reviewed by the court, they were deemed not privileged after all.
“The court is taken aback by the lengths to which Google goes to avoid creating a paper trail for regulators and litigants,” Judge Amit P. Mehta of the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia wrote. Google, he noted, had clearly learned Microsoft’s lesson: It had effectively trained its employees not to create “bad” evidence.
Judge Mehta said it ultimately did not matter: In August, he found Google guiltyof being a monopoly. Still, he said, he did not think the company was behaving well.
“Any company that puts the onus on its employees to identify and preserve relevant evidence does so at its own peril,” he wrote, adding that Google might not be so lucky to avoid sanctions in the next case.
The next case arrived in September, when the Justice Department argued in Judge Brinkema’s courtroom in Virginia that Google had built a monopoly in the highly profitable technology that served online ads.
Exhibits in the cases showed that Googlers had learned to be a little paranoid for the good of Google and their own careers. Talk in the dark, they insisted over and over, rather than in the light.
“How do we turn History off?” Adam Juda, a vice president for product management, wrote in a 2020 chat. “I don’t do History on 🙂.”
Sometimes executives were so worried about leaving a record that they defaulted to obsolete technology.
In 2017, Robert Kyncl, then the chief business officer at the Google subsidiary YouTube, asked his boss, Susan Wojcicki, if she had a fax machine at home. Mr. Kyncl explained he had a “privileged doc” and “just didn’t want to send email.” Ms. Wojcicki, who died in August, did not have a fax machine.
If employees wanted to keep an electronic record, they were rebuked. In a group chat from 2021, one employee inquired: “ok for me to keep history on here? need to keep some info for memory purposes.”
Not OK, said Danielle Romain, the vice president of Trust, a Google team that looks for solutions that enhance user privacy and trust. “The discussion that started this thread gets into legal and potentially competitive territory, which I’d like to be conscientious of having under privilege,” she said. “I’d like to stick to the default of history off.”
Julia Tarver Wood, a Justice Department lawyer, said at an August hearing in the ad-tech case that Google employees “referred to these off-the-record chats as ‘Vegas.’ What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas.”
Google maintained that it did its best to provide the government with the documents it could, and that, in any case, the Justice Department did not establish that the deleted conversations were crucial to its case. The Justice Department said it could not do that because the material had been deleted.
Regulators have recently underlined that there is no “Vegas” in chats. This year, the F.T.C. and the Justice Department’s antitrust division made it “crystal clear”in an enforcement memo: Communications through messaging apps are documents and must be preserved if there is threat of litigation.
Last year, Google changed its procedures. The default became saving everything, including chats. Employees on litigation holds can no longer turn chat history off.
Old habits die hard, however. In one chat, employees responded to the news by forming a group to secretly communicate on WhatsApp, Meta’s secure messaging app.
David Streitfeld writes about technology and the people who make it and how it affects the world around them. He is based in San Francisco. More about David Streitfeld“
Monday, November 18, 2024
Sunday, November 17, 2024
Earth’s second moon confirmed : Scientists discover new natural satellite orbiting our planet
Earth’s second moon confirmed : Scientists discover new natural satellite orbiting our planet
“In a groundbreaking astronomical discovery, scientists have confirmed that Earth now has a second moon. This celestial companion, known as asteroid 2024 PT5, was captured by our planet’s gravity on September 29, 2024. The revelation has sparked excitement in the scientific community and offers new opportunities for studying near-Earth objects.
Astronomers at the Complutense University of Madrid first spotted this intriguing event using a powerful telescope in Sutherland, South Africa. The tiny asteroid, measuring just 37 feet wide, has been temporarily ensnared by Earth’s gravitational pull, transforming it into a mini-moon.
Richard Binzel, an astronomer at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), explains, “These happen with some frequency, but we rarely see them because they’re very small and very hard to detect. Only recently has our survey capability reached the point of spotting them routinely.”
While Earth’s primary moon boasts a diameter of 2,159 miles, 2024 PT5 is comparatively minuscule. To put it in perspective :
- Earth’s moon : 2,159 miles wide
- Asteroid 2024 PT5 : 37 feet wide
- Size difference : Earth’s moon is over 300,000 times wider
Despite its small size, this temporary satellite provides valuable insights into our cosmic neighborhood and the dynamics of near-Earth objects.
The journey of Earth’s new mini-moon
Asteroid 2024 PT5 belongs to the Arjuna asteroid belt, a group of space rocks that follow orbits similar to Earth’s, approximately 93 million miles from the sun. Some Arjuna asteroids can approach our planet at a close range of around 2.8 million miles, traveling at relatively low velocities of less than 2,200 miles per hour.
According to data from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory Horizons system, 2024 PT5’s stay in Earth’s orbit will be brief. The capture began at 3 :54 p.m. EDT on September 29, 2024, and is expected to end at 11 :43 a.m. EDT on November 25, 2024.
Carlos de la Fuente Marcos, a professor and mini-moon expert from the Complutense University, likens the asteroid’s behavior to that of a window shopper. He states, “Asteroid 2024 PT5 will not describe a full orbit around Earth. You may say that if a true satellite is like a customer buying goods inside a store, objects like 2024 PT5 are window shoppers.”
This celestial visitor’s journey serves as a reminder of the dynamic nature of our solar system. While it won’t remain in Earth’s orbit for billions of years like our primary moon, its fleeting presence offers a unique opportunity for scientific study.
The significance of mini-moons in astronomical research
Mini-moons like 2024 PT5 provide scientists with valuable opportunities to study near-Earth objects up close. These temporary captures act as natural cosmic laboratories, offering insights into the composition of asteroids and the intricate workings of our solar system.
Binzel emphasizes the importance of these events, stating, “These temporary captures are natural cosmic laboratories. They help us understand the small bodies that come close to Earth and could be important for future space missions.”
While mini-moons are too small and dim for most amateur astronomers to observe, they fall within the detection range of professional-grade telescopes. To spot 2024 PT5, one would need :
| Equipment | Specifications |
|---|---|
| Telescope diameter | At least 30 inches |
| Detector | CCD or CMOS |
The study of mini-moons contributes to our understanding of near-Earth asteroids and their potential impact on our planet. By analyzing these temporary satellites, scientists can refine their models of asteroid behavior and improve our ability to predict and mitigate potential collisions.
Future implications and ongoing research
As technology advances, researchers hope to study these fleeting visitors more closely. Future missions may even attempt to gather samples or test new spacecraft designs using mini-moons as targets.
The discovery of 2024 PT5 and other mini-moons highlights the ever-changing nature of our cosmic environment. It serves as a reminder that our solar system is a dynamic place, full of surprises and opportunities for scientific exploration.
While Earth’s second moon may be temporary, its presence opens up new avenues for research and discovery. As we continue to scan the skies, who knows what other celestial wonders we might uncover ? The universe never ceases to amaze, and each new finding brings us one step closer to unraveling its mysteries.“
Sunday, November 10, 2024
Thursday, November 07, 2024
Wednesday, November 06, 2024
Voyager 1 Breaks Its Silence With NASA via a Radio Transmitter Not Used Since 1981
Voyager 1 Breaks Its Silence With NASA via a Radio Transmitter Not Used Since 1981
“The farthest spacecraft in the universe went momentarily rogue, but scientists breathed a sigh of relief when it reconnected at an unexpected radio frequency
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In 1977, NASA launched Voyager 1 and 2: a pair of spacecraft tasked with touring Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune by taking advantage of a rare alignment of the outer planets that only happens once every 175 years. The two probes had both completed their encounters with these worlds by 1989, and since then, they’ve traveled to the outer limits of our solar system and beyond, sending critical scientific data back to Earth.
Recently, however, Voyager 1 briefly fell silent. It broke communication with NASA in mid-October, then restored contact in an unexpected way: a backup radio transmitter that had been inactive since 1981.
“The spacecraft recently turned off one of its two radio transmitters, and the team is now working to determine what caused the issue,” according to a NASA blog post.
NASA’s twin Voyager probes have been flying for 47 years, which means the agency’s scientists and engineers back on Earth have increasingly had to deal with age-related maintenance issues, per Space.com’s Samantha Mathewson. Last December, for instance, Voyager 1 started sending nonsensical transmissions. Engineers solved the problem five months later, restoring the craft to its full abilities by this summer.
On October 16, Voyager 1 experienced another hiccup. Scientists sent the probe a command to turn on one of its heaters, but for some reason, the command triggered its fault protection system, which is built to respond autonomously to issues onboard. To preserve energy, the fault protection system occasionally turns off nonessential processes, but Voyager 1 should have had enough energy to run the heater.
Because the probe is currently more than 15 billion miles away—making it the farthest spacecraft from Earth—it takes almost 23 hours for a command to reach the craft and another 23 hours for its response to reach scientists. That means the NASA team only noticed something was wrong two days later, when they didn’t detect a response from the probe.
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Scientists communicate with both Voyager probes by using a radio transmitter that operates on X-band frequencies, within a range of 8 to 12 gigahertz, via NASA’s Deep Space Network, a web of giant radio antennas that make up the world’s biggest and most sensitive scientific telecommunications system. NASA quickly realized, however, that to preserve energy, Voyager 1 had begun sending signals at a lower rate on the transmitter, and teams found the new signal successfully.
Then, on October 19, Voyager 1 fell silent again. The team speculated that the probe might have completely turned off its X-band transmitter in favor of a backup S-band radio transmitter, which operates at a much lower frequency of two to four gigahertz—an instrument it hadn’t used in 43 years. Communicating on the S-band uses less power, but its signal is also fainter, so if that was the case, NASA scientists weren’t sure whether they’d be able to detect it from Earth. Coupled with the fact that Voyager 1 is much farther away now than it was when it last used the S-band in the ’80s, finding the signal could have been a difficult task.
Luckily, the Deep Space Network was indeed able to pick up the new, weaker signal, and scientists are now working to understand what caused Voyager 1 to switch off its X-band transmitter.
The agency’s engineers will proceed with caution, since they don’t want to risk the spacecraft’s welfare by trying to turn the X-band back on prematurely, as Bruce Waggoner, the Voyager mission assurance manager, tells CNN’s Ashley Strickland. But if they can get the transmitter back online, it might tell them what went wrong.
“The S-band signal is too weak to use long term,” Waggoner tells CNN. “So far, the team has not been able to use it to get telemetry (information about the health and status of the spacecraft), let alone science data. But it allows us to at least send commands and make sure the spacecraft is still pointed at Earth.”
Despite how long ago the twin probes launched, the Voyager spacecraft were built to last. “A profound insight gleaned from Voyager 1’s odyssey is the significance of redundancy in mission-critical hardware,” Eric Ralls writes for Earth.com. “The foresight to incorporate a backup radio transmitter, decades ago, underscores the necessity of planning for the unforeseen in space exploration.”
“We didn’t design them to last 30 years or 40 years, we designed them not to fail,” John Casani, Voyager project manager from 1975 to 1977, says in a NASA statement.
In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to cross out of the heliosphere—a sort of bubble surrounding the solar system filled with the solar magnetic field and solar wind—making it the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space. Voyager 2 reached the cosmic milestone six years later.
Voyager 1 will likely have enough power to run its scientific instruments until 2025, per Newsweek’s Tom Howarth, but NASA should be able to maintain communication with the spacecraft into the 2030s.“