One of NASA's spacecraft operating outside the heliosphere began sending meaningless messages to Earth late last year, then went silent.
A strange incident happened to the NASA ship named Voyager 1, operating in interstellar space. Late last year, it started "talking nonsense" to Earth and NASA just found out the truth.
According to Space.com, they discovered a problem with the ship's system called FDS. The FDS is responsible for "packaging" the probe's scientific and technical data before another system called the TMU and radio transmitter send them back to the operations base on Earth.
The source of the problem began to be revealed when Voyager operators sent a strong signal like a poke to the ship last March, to remind FDS to "package" a readout of the entire memory to send back.
Responses from it showed that about 3% of the FDS's memory was corrupted, preventing the computer from operating normally.
Thus, the strange signals it encountered were not caused by an alien attacker or some harsh element of the interstellar environment, as some had speculated.
NASA said it is still looking for a way to fix the problem so it can continue to learn about the mysterious space outside the heliosphere, as well as the dream of an alien approaching Voyager 1 or Voyager 2. Twins".
This NASA ship left Earth in 1977, carrying a golden disc recording 55 greetings in 55 common languages in the world, as well as 116 images and countless sounds from nature, some music...
This golden disc is intended to introduce Earth if it is lucky enough to be approached by an alien.
Its twin Voyager 2 also carries a similar golden disc and has also long since left the inner solar system.