Happy Fathers' Day!
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NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is fully back online after months of issues, and it we can now resume researching its journey into deep space.
Voyager 1 first experienced issues in November 2023 when it started sending incomprehensible data back to Earth. Instead of binary code, it was sending back gibberish, but that wasn't too surprising given its age. Voyager 1 was launched in September 1977 to explore the outer reaches of our solar system, making it 46 years old, and had been working smoothly (for the most part) until November.
In April, scientists finally managed to re-establish contact with Voyager 1. They discovered that there was a corrupted chip aboard the vessel which was jumbling all of the outbound data. Troubleshooting was a huge pain, though-- since Voyager 1 is so far from Earth, it takes 22.5 hours to just send one message to the spacecraft, and another 22.5 hours to get a reply. Thankfully, they were able to get it up and running again in April, but only two of its four scientific instruments were functioning.
Recently, they managed to fix the other two instruments, meaning that Voyager 1 is fully operational-- for now. The Voyager program, launched in 1977, contained two spacecrafts: Voyager 1 and Voyager 2. Their aim was to research Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune, and they would keep collecting data until around 2020. Voyager 1 passed Jupiter and Saturn before heading into deep space, while Voyager 2 passed all four gas giants before heading in a different direction. Since then, Voyager 1 has traveled 15 billion miles, and Voyager 2 has traveled about 12.7 billion miles. That seems like a lot, but it is actually barely anything in the realm of deep space. 1 light year is 5.88 trillion miles (almost 400 times how far Voyager 1 has traveled), and the nearest star to us, Proxima Centauri, is 4.24 light years away.
However, the lifespan of these scientific is coming to an end. The spacecrafts are powered using plutonium, but their power supply will come to an end in a couple of years. NASA is hoping to keep them going for as long as 2036, but their life expectancy is more realistically around 2030. 2027 will be the program's 50th birthday, so NASA is trying to help them at least make it until then. After 2036, they will be too far for our network to reach, and they will then float through the galaxy as a beacon of human life in deep space.
Fact of the Day (Reader's Digest): Some boars actually wash their food before eating. Scientists spotted boars at a zoo in Switzerland washing off a sandy apple in a lake and also later watched them wash a dead chicken before they ate it.
Quote of the Day (Gracious Quotes): Nobody likes to fail but failure is an essential part of life and of learning. If your uniform isn’t dirty, you haven’t been in the game. (Ben Bernanke)
Word of the Day (Merriam-Webster): Unbeknownst (adj) - Unbeknownst means “without being known about by (a specified person or group of people).”
In a Sentence: Unbeknownst to the students, the teacher had entered the room.
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