Voyager 1 probe has new communication (and heating) problems

This is undoubtedly the unmanned mission to which we are most attached. The legendary Voyager 1 and 2 in some way closed the golden age of space – the culminating event of which was the arrival of Man on the Moon – and initiated the era of space robotics, carried high by the Curiosity and Perseverance rovers.
We will see below, after the story of the situation, why these missions are so dear to us.

Voyager 1's communication with Earth in danger!

Here's what happened:

On October 16, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) flight team sent a command to turn on the machine's heater. 23 hours pass for the signal to travel 24 billion km, and another 23 hours for a return signal to return to Earth.

On October 18, when the return signal was supposed to arrive, the Deep Space Network (DSN) teams waited in vain. Voyager 1 remains silent. The teams assume that the heating control must have put the system into fault mode and that a slightly degraded signal was sent. Later, they actually find the signal sent by Voyager. They assess that the machine, despite the breakdown, appears to be in a stable condition.

On October 19, no further communication reached NASA. It was then decided to switch Voyager 1 to a less energy-intensive communication mode: the S band radio transmitter (13 cm), to the detriment of the seems to have cut himself. The S band is a much weaker signal, no longer used since 1981 when Voyager 1 was twenty-four times closer to Earth! The teams then fear that the S signal will not be detectable. But it is finally captured by the DSN.

On October 22, an S-band command was sent to Voyager to verify that communication was working properly. The teams have since sought to understand exactly the origin of the failure, and, it is hoped, to return Voyager 1 to its nominal operating state, or at least, its state before the failure.

There's a little bit of all of us in Voyager!

And if we are so sentimentally attached to these two 700 kg machines, which left 47 years ago and which will never return, it is for two main reasons:

• Each one takes a record, the Golden Records, and messages that will survive us. There is a kind of poem of the Earth and of Humanity transporting into the black and heatless silence of deep space, the song of a nightingale, that of the Pygmies of Zaire, the rolling of the waves, the smack of the kiss of a mother to her child, and even the crash of a Saturn V taking off. It is a safe bet that after the disappearance of the last form of life on Earth in 1 billion years, these disks will continue their journey that the void does not stop. So there is a little bit of us – an eternal us or almost – in the Universe.

• Voyager 1 and 2 are the furthest human artifacts from Earth (they are even said to have “left” the Solar System, see box below). A single communication with them, a round trip message, takes 46 hours as we have seen. But we still need to be able to capture this signal…