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The Voyager program was launched by the space agency in the 1970s to take advantage of a favorable alignment of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Although its original mission was to study only the planetary systems of Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 2 continued on Uranus and Neptune. Voyagers 1 and 2 now explore the outer boundary of the heliosphere in interstellar space: their mission has been extended three times and they continue to transmit useful scientific data.
But Discovery Channel’s “unexplained NASA files” revealed how perplexed scientists were when something bizarre happened to Voyager 2.
The narrator said, NASA’s groundbreaking Voyager 2 probe is more than three decades away on its epic journey to deep space.
“On April 22, 2010, just as the aircraft prepares to cross the border into interstellar space, it mysteriously malfunctions.
“Someone, or something, has altered Voyager 2’s communications system.”
Planetary scientist Kevin Baines detailed what was being relayed back to Earth.
He added: “It moves about 10 billion miles away from Earth and suddenly sends data in a language we don’t understand.
“By checking the systems with another downlink, they could tell there was nothing wrong with the spacecraft, it’s just this system.”
The researchers realized that the problem was that a single digit in Voyager 2’s communication system had been changed from one to zero.
The series went on to explain in detail why this led to speculation that the probe had been breached.
READ MORE: NASA’s “surprising” Mars discovery supported “life thriving” on the surface of the Red Planet
Although the data was unreadable, NASA could still obtain the aircraft’s health data, which showed everything was intact.
Cosmic rays, high-energy particles from interstellar space, are believed to be the culprits.
According to a large IBM study on the subject, computers on Earth experience a cosmic-ray-induced error for 256 megabytes of RAM per month.
The study examined the feasibility of using computers safely in the Earth’s magnetic field.
Voyager 2 was on the edge of the Solar System, where cosmic sources of radiation are most intense, which may have disturbed the system.
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