The Minister is occasionally perplexed by the silliness some people say. In late April (last month), NASA engineers announced that the spacecraft Voyager 2 was having some software errors in its transmissions back home to Earth:
Engineers have shifted NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft into a mode that transmits only spacecraft health and status data while they diagnose an unexpected change in the pattern of returning data. Preliminary engineering data received on May 1 show the spacecraft is basically healthy, and that the source of the issue is the flight data system, which is responsible for formatting the data to send back to Earth. The change in the data return pattern has prevented mission managers from decoding science data.
The first changes in the return of data packets from Voyager 2, which is near the edge of our solar system, appeared on April 22. Mission team members have been working to troubleshoot and resume the regular flow of science data. Because of a planned roll maneuver and moratorium on sending commands, engineers got their first chance to send commands to the spacecraft on April 30. It takes nearly 13 hours for signals to reach the spacecraft and nearly 13 hours for signals to come down to NASA's Deep Space Network on Earth. (Source)
Considering that the two Voyager spacecraft have been in flight for 33 years (Voyager 2 was launched on August 20, 1977), the occasional software glitch is a very minor hiccup for such an old but functional spacecraft.
But some people, instead of viewing the problem rationally, choose to let their imaginations run rampant:
German researcher Hartwig Hausdorf has chalked up the problem to aliens. To be specific, he posits that the Voyager 2 was hijacked by aliens. According to Bild.com, Hausdorf said
"It seems almost as if someone had reprogrammed or hijacked the probe – thus perhaps we do not yet know the whole truth…”
Bild writer Attila Albert speculated that the Golden Record might have attracted the aliens.
Really now! Aliens have hijacked Voyager 2! Tell me, Herr Hausdorf, don't you think you should take off that aluminum foil cap you're wearing?
Image credits:
Top: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Bottom: Touchstone Pictures/Blinding Edge Pictures/The Kennedy/Marshall Company
HT: Digital Journal
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