It Takes Two Days, For Light To Go Round Trip To Where Voyager 1 Is, Now... So "Talking" Is... Slow As Molasses.

Again, Anon. found a great story I'd missed. As Anon. perfectly riffs, the Voyager One craft (middle -- lithe lil' ship, at right) was also the subject of the original Star Trek theater release. . . and in that telling, the craft's antenna must be reconnected, by Earthlings, so that a self-aware silicon based computer planet / spaceship (in blue, upper right side). . . may touch what it regards as its creator. And thus download all the knowledge it has amassed, wandering the Universe -- for hundreds of millennia.

To give the thing a "human element" though, the computer-being had taken the human form of the ever-fetching Persis Khambatta (natch', with the shaved head, at right!). . . formerly an officer on the Enterprise. And so it is no small irony that it seems the real Voyager One is now -- via a "glitch" (or, a computer planet?!) -- incorrectly reporting the attitude of its antenna. Perhaps it wants us to come out with a touch-up mission. Smile. . . .

In any event, here is the NASA story -- from from Space.com -- with a hat tip, to Anon.:

. . .NASA's Voyager 1 mission launched in 1977, passed into what scientists call interstellar space in 2012 and just kept going — the spacecraft is now 14.5 billion miles (23.3 billion kilometers) away from Earth. And while Voyager 1 is still operating properly, scientists on the mission recently noticed that it appeared confused about its location in space without going into safe mode or otherwise sounding an alarm.

"A mystery like this is sort of par for the course at this stage of the Voyager mission," Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. . . .

One of the first rules of space flight, is. . . if it is working, but you don't know why it is working. . . leave it alone. We shall see if NASA can resist the urge to "correct" what is likely 45 years of interstellar radiation degraded circuits not spitting out accurate ones and zeros. Just let it fly, people -- it has long exceeded every mission goal, and any fix. . . might prematurely end it (just like Decker and I'lya). Grin. . . what a guilty pleasure of a movie.



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