NASA has confirmed that after a pause in communications with Voyager 1 in late October, the spacecraft has regained its voice and resumed regular operations.
Voyager unexpectedly turned off its primary radio transmitter, known as its X-band, before turning on its much weaker S-band transmitter in October.
The interstellar spacecraft is currently located about 15.4 billion miles away from Earth and the S-band had not been used in over 40 years.
Communication between NASA and Voyager 1 has been spotty at times and the switch to the lower band prevented the Voyager mission team from downloading science data and information about the spacecraft’s status.
Earlier this month, the team was able to reactivate the X-band transmitter and resume collection of data from the four operating science instruments onboard Voyager 1.
Now that the data can be collected and communications have resumed, engineers are finishing a few remaining tasks to return Voyager 1 back to the state it was in before the issue came up. One task is to reset the system that synchronizes Voyager 1’s three onboard computers.
The S-band was activated by the spacecraft’s fault protection system when engineers activated a heater on Voyager 1. The fault protection system determined the probe did not have enough power and automatically turned off systems that were not necessary to keep the spacecraft flying in order to keep providing power to critical systems.
But in the process, the probes turned off all nonessential systems except for science instruments, NASA said, turning off the X-band and activating the S-band, which uses less power.
Voyager 1 had not used the S-band to communicate with Earth since 1981.
Voyager 1′s odyssey began in 1977, when the spacecraft and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched on a tour of the gas giant planets of the solar system.
After beaming back dazzling postcard views of Jupiter’s giant red spot and Saturn’s shimmering rings, Voyager 2 hopscotched to Uranus and Neptune. Meanwhile, Voyager 1 used Saturn as a gravitational slingshot to power itself past Pluto.
There are 10 science instruments on each spacecraft, and according to NASA, four are currently being used to study the particles, plasma and magnetic fields in interstellar space.
After a brief pause in communications with Voyager 1, NASA re-established a connection with the interstellar spacecraft located more than 15 billion miles away from Earth, using a frequency not used more than forty years.
Communication between NASA and Voyager 1 has been spotty at times. In fact, the spacecraft stopped sending readable data to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California on Nov. 14, 2023, and it was not until April that mission controllers began receiving commands once again.
More recently, the spacecraft turned off one of its two transmitters after what engineers suspected was due to Voyager 1’s fault protection system, which autonomously responds to onboard issues.
For instance, if the spacecraft uses too much power from its supply source, fault protection will kick in to conserve power by turning off non-essential systems, NASA explained.
The space agency said the flight team sent a command to activate one of the spacecraft’s heaters on Oct. 16. The command takes nearly 23 hours to travel from Earth to the spacecraft, and then another 23 hours for the data to travel back.
Engineers suspected Voyager 1 should have had plenty of power to operate the heather, though the fault protection system was triggered.
On Oct. 18, the team learned about the issue, because the Deep Space Network was unable to detect Voyager 1’s signal. Communication between NASA and the spacecraft occurs on the X-band radio transmitter, named for the frequency it uses.
The fault protection system lowered the rate the transmitter was able to send data back to NASA, engineers determined, therefore changing the X-band signal the Deep Space Network needed to listen for.
Once the signal was located, Voyager 1 appeared to be in a stable state and the team began investigating what happened.
But on Oct. 19, communication between the team and Voyager 1 stopped again, this time entirely.
The team believed Voyager 1’s fault protection system was triggered two more times and switched to a second radio transmitter called the S-band, which uses less power.
Voyager 1 had not used the S-band to communicate with Earth since 1981.
Engineers with the Deep Space Network were ultimately able to detect the spacecraft’s communication from the S-band. Rather than risk turning the X-band back on before finding out what caused the fault protection system to trigger, the team sent a command on Oct. 22 to confirm the S-band transmitter was working.
Now, the team is working to gather information to help them find out what happened so it can return Voyager 1 back to normal operations.
Voyager 1′s odyssey began in 1977 when the spacecraft and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched on a tour of the gas giant planets of the solar system.
After beaming back dazzling postcard views of Jupiter’s giant red spot and Saturn’s shimmering rings, Voyager 2 hopscotched to Uranus and Neptune. Meanwhile, Voyager 1 used Saturn as a gravitational slingshot to power itself past Pluto.
The Orionids meteor shower, which is considered to be one of the most beautiful showers of the year, could light up the sky with shooting stars through most of next month.
NASA said the Orionids peak during mid-October every year, and the meteors are known for their brightness and speed.
The ability to see the shooting stars depends on clear nighttime skies, as a bright waning gibbous moon moves between full and last quarter phases, outshining more faint meteors and reducing the number of meteors visible to sky-gazers.
According to NASA,some of the Orionids leave behind glowing "trains," or incandescent bits of debris in the wake of the meteor, which could last up to several minutes, and some faster meteors could also become fireballs.
The Orionids meteors are pieces of the Halley's Comet and are framed by some of the brightest stars in the night sky.
"Each time that Halley returns to the inner solar system, its nucleus sheds ice and rocky dust into space. These dust grains eventually become the Orionids in October and the Eta Aquarids in May if they collide with Earth’s atmosphere," NASA said.
At the meteor shower’s peak, which is scheduled for Monday, skywatchers could see up to 15 meteors per hour, depending on where they are in the Northern Hemisphere.
While clear skies are important, the second most crucial viewing condition is a dark sky away from light pollution.
Bill Cooke, who leads NASA’s Meteoroid Environment Office at Marshall Space Flight Center in Huntsville, Alabama, suggests budding skywatchers find an area away from city lights.
"Come prepared with a blanket. Lie flat on your back and look up, taking in as much of the sky as possible," he said on NASA’s site. "In less than 30 minutes in the dark, your eyes will adapt, and you will begin to see meteors."
While the Orionids meteor shower peak is on Oct. 21, the Orionids will be active through Nov. 22.
It takes Halley’s Comet 76 years to orbit the sun, and the last time it was visible to casual astronomers was in 1986. The comet is not expected to enter the inner solar system again until 2061, NASA said.
In less than 48 hours, SpaceX pulled off a stunning feat, conducting four launches in three states, with huge implications for the future of space exploration.
The first launch came on Sunday, with the enormous Starship rocket blasting off from the southern tip of Texas. Remarkably, the first-stage booster flew back to the launch pad, where the tower’s metal arms caught the descending 232-foot booster.
SpaceX CEO Elon Musk called it a "Big step towards making life multiplanetary."
The spacecraft continued its journey around the world, soaring more than 130 miles high before eventually landing in the Indian Ocean, piling on SpaceX’s achievements.
Starship is the biggest and most powerful rocket ever built, with 33 methane-fuel engines on the booster alone.
The next day, a NASA spacecraft lifted off aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket from the Kennedy Space Center in Cape Canaveral, Florida, bound for Jupiter and its moon Europa.
The Europa Clipper will peer beneath the moon’s icy crust to determine whether conditions there could support life.
Then on early Tuesday, SpaceX launched two Falcon 9 rockets – one from Florida and another in California – sending dozens of Starlink satellites into orbit.
The first launch, from Cape Canaveral, marked SpaceX’s 100th launch of the year, with still two-and-a-half months left in 2024.
A NASA spacecraft is ready to set sail for Jupiter and its moon Europa, one of the best bets for finding life beyond Earth.
Europa Clipper will peer beneath the moon’s icy crust where an ocean is thought to be sloshing fairly close to the surface. It won’t search for life, but rather determine whether conditions there could support it. Another mission would be needed to flush out any microorganisms lurking there.
"It’s a chance for us to explore not a world that might have been habitable billions of years ago, but a world that might be habitable today — right now," said program scientist Curt Niebur.
Its massive solar panels make Clipper the biggest craft built by NASA to investigate another planet. It will take 5 1/2 years to reach Jupiter and will sneak within 16 miles of Europa's surface — considerably closer than any other spacecraft.
Liftoff is targeted for this month aboard SpaceX’s Falcon Heavy rocket from NASA’s Kennedy Space Center. Mission cost: $5.2 billion.
One of Jupiter’s 95 known moons, Europa is almost the size of our own moon. It's encased in an ice sheet estimated to be 10 miles to 15 miles or more thick. Scientists believe this frozen crust hides an ocean that could be 80 miles or more deep. The Hubble Space Telescope has spotted what appear to be geysers erupting from the surface. Discovered by Galileo in 1610, Europa is one of the four so-called Galilean moons of Jupiter, along with Ganymede, Io and Callisto.
What type of life might Europa harbor? Besides water, organic compounds are needed for life as we know it, plus an energy source. In Europa’s case that could be thermal vents on the ocean floor. Deputy project scientist Bonnie Buratti imagines any life would be primitive like the bacterial life that originated in Earth’s deep ocean vents. "We will not know from this mission because we can’t see that deep," she said. Unlike missions to Mars where habitability is one of many questions, Clipper’s sole job is to establish whether the moon could support life in its ocean or possibly in any pockets of water in the ice.
When its solar wings and antennas are unfurled, Clipper is about the size of a basketball court — more than 100 feet end to end — and weighs nearly 13,000 pounds. The supersized solar panels are needed because of Jupiter’s distance from the sun. The main body — about the size of a camper — is packed with nine science instruments, including radar that will penetrate the ice, cameras that will map virtually the entire moon and tools to tease out the contents of Europa’s surface and tenuous atmosphere. The name hearkens to the swift sailing ships of centuries past.
The roundabout trip to Jupiter will span 1.8 billion miles. For extra oomph, the spacecraft will swing past Mars early next year and then Earth in late 2026. It arrives at Jupiter in 2030 and begins science work the next year. While orbiting Jupiter, it will cross paths with Europa 49 times. The mission ends in 2034 with a planned crash into Ganymede — Jupiter’s biggest moon and the solar system's too.
There’s more radiation around Jupiter than anywhere else in our solar system, besides the sun. Europa passes through Jupiter’s bands of radiation as it orbits the gas giant, making it especially menacing for spacecraft. That’s why Clipper’s electronics are inside a vault with dense aluminum and zinc walls. All this radiation would nix any life on Europa’s surface. But it could break down water molecules and, perhaps, release oxygen all the way down into the ocean that could possibly fuel sea life.
Earlier this year, NASA was in a panic that the spacecraft's many transistors might not withstand the intense radiation. But after months of analysis, engineers concluded the mission could proceed as planned.
NASA’s twin Pioneer spacecraft and then two Voyagers swept past Jupiter in the 1970s. The Voyagers provided the first detailed photos of Europa but from quite a distance. NASA’s Galileo spacecraft had repeated flybys of the moon during the 1990s, passing as close as 124 miles. Still in action around Jupiter, NASA’s Juno spacecraft has added to Europa’s photo album. Arriving at Jupiter a year after Clipper will be the European Space Agency’s Juice spacecraft, launched last year.
Like Europa, Jupiter’s jumbo moon Ganymede is thought to host an underground ocean. But its frozen shell is much thicker — possibly 100 miles thick — making it tougher to probe the environment below. Callisto’s ice sheet may be even thicker, possibly hiding an ocean. Saturn’s moon Enceladus has geysers shooting up, but it’s much farther than Jupiter. Ditto for Saturn’s moon Titan, also suspected of having a subterranean sea. While no ocean worlds have been confirmed beyond our solar system, scientists believe they’re out there — and may even be relatively common.
Like many robotic explorers before it, Clipper bears messages from Earth. Attached to the electronics vault is a triangular metal plate. On one side is a design labeled "water words" with representations of the word for water in 104 languages. On the opposite side: a poem about the moon by U.S. poet laureate Ada Limon and a silicon chip containing the names of 2.6 million people who signed up to vicariously ride along.
A study published last week proposed that dark matter may be responsible for an observable wobble in Mars’ orbit.
The study, published in the peer-reviewed scientific journal Physical Review, postulates the theory that dark matter compromises microscopic, or primordial, black holes.
Unlike astrophysical black holes, these primordial black holes formed when dense pockets of gas collapsed in the seconds after the Big Bang and scattered throughout the universe because of expansion.
Despite being as small as an atom, these primordial black holes would be heavier than thousands of solar masses and constitute dark matter.
First theorized in the 1930s by Swiss astronomer Fritz Zwicky, dark matter is a form of matter undetectable to the human eye. It does not emit light or energy but makes up roughly a quarter of the universe’s mass. Researchers have proposed its existence based on the gravitational pull on other visible matter.
The new study, "Close encounters of the primordial kind," theorizes that dark matter, made up of primordial black holes, is pushing Mars’ orbit slightly off track because of its extreme mass.
The researchers, comprising MIT physicists, backed up their theory with a simulation of Mars’ orbit which aligned with their proposal.
The researchers theorized that these primordial black holes would introduce a wobble into Mars' orbit at least once per decade during zooms through the solar system.
Astronomers can detect such a wobble thanks to advances in telemetry, or measuring the distance between planets.
"We’re taking advantage of this highly instrumented region of space to try and look for a small effect," said co-author and physics professor David Kaiser. "If we see it, that would count as a real reason to keep pursuing this delightful idea that all of dark matter consists of black holes that were spawned in less than a second after the Big Bang and have been streaming around the universe for 14 billion years."
Scientists in Albuquerque, New Mexico, say potentially dangerous asteroids could possibly be deflected by exploding a nuclear warhead more than a mile from its surface and showering it with X-rays to send it in a different direction.
Previous methods, as seen in blockbuster movies like "Armageddon" and "Deep Impact," involved blowing up a nuclear warhead on an asteroid or comet and shattering it into multiple pieces.
But scientists now say the method would change the space object from a lethal bullet headed toward Earth into a shotgun blast of multiple fragments.
Last year, the National Academy of Sciences released a report calling planetary defense a national priority, and according to an ongoing NASA sky survey, the threat is credible.
The sky survey found there are about 25,000 objects big enough to cause varying degrees of destruction to Earth, and only about a third of them have been detected and tracked, according to a press release from the Sandia National Laboratories in Albuquerque.
Many of the objects move invisibly in the sun’s glare. In 2013, a relatively small object created chaos in Russia while a larger asteroid is credited with ending the age of dinosaurs.
"To most people, the danger from asteroids seems remote," Nathan Moore, a physicist at Sandia National Laboratories said. "But our planet is hit by BB-sized asteroids every day. We call them shooting stars. We don’t want to wait for a large asteroid to show up and then scramble for the right method to deflect it."
Moore’s team conducted several experiments with Sandia’s Z machine, the most powerful pulsed-power machine on Earth, to monitor the deflection of synthetic asteroids hit by Z’s sudden shocks.
While the machine is on Earth, all experiments are affected by gravity, though Moore’s team was able to beat the inevitable force temporarily to create a better simulation of asteroids floating freely in space.
Moore’s experiments used a technique called X-ray scissors, which removed the skewing effect of friction and gravity for a few microseconds.
The X-ray scissors allowed the model to create the effect of redirecting a free-floating asteroid when hit by a series of nuclear-intensity explosions.
Although the experiments were done in a much smaller environment than space, they could be scaled to predict the effects of nuclear explosions on an actual asteroid.
"I started working through the logic of how I could deflect a miniature asteroid in a laboratory just like in outer space," Moore said. "A key fact was that asteroids in outer space aren’t attached to anything. But in a lab, everything is pulled down by Earth’s gravity, so everything is held in place by its gravitational attachment to something else. This wouldn’t let our mock asteroid move with the freedom of one in outer space. And mechanical attachments would create friction that would perturb the mock asteroid’s motion."
And that’s where the X-ray scissors came in. The method allowed scientists to release a mock asteroid the size of a tenth of a gram and made of silica, into the free space vacuum.
The material was suspended by foil eight times thinner than human hair, which vaporized instantly when the Z machine fired.
The silica was then left free-floating as the X-ray burst hit it.
"It was a novel idea," Moore said. "A mock asteroid is suspended in space. For a one-nanometer fall, we can ignore Earth’s gravity for 20 millionths of a second as Z produces a burst of X-rays that sweeps over the mock-asteroid surface 12.5 millimeters across, about the width of a finger.
"The trick is to use just enough force to redirect the flying rock without splitting it into several equally deadly subsections advancing toward Earth," Moore added, referring to a real intercept scenario like the recent NASA DART experiment.
The news comes just days after NASA monitored a "potentially hazardous" asteroid moving past Earth last Tuesday.
NASA told Fox News Digital that the rocky object, which has been named 2024 ON, is 350 meters long by 180 meters wide, which roughly equals 1,150 feet by 590 feet — larger than previous estimates.
NASA has deemed the asteroid "stadium-sized" and reported it was 621,000 miles away from Earth, which is considered relatively close. Davide Farnocchia, a navigation engineer at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Fox News Digital that an asteroid of this size coming this close to Earth only happens every five to ten years.
Although the asteroid was close enough to Earth to be deemed a "potentially hazardous object," Farnocchia said there is no chance the asteroid would hit Earth. The asteroid would need to be within a couple of hundred miles to be a concern.
The asteroid was one of five that would pass by Earth last week, but the other rocky objects were not expected to come nearly as close as 2024 ON. The four asteroids were between 1.1 to 3.9 million miles away from Earth, and three of the asteroids measured roughly 51 feet in diameter, which is the size of a house.
Fox News Digital’s Andrea Vacchiano contributed to this report.
Login
