It left Earth 33 years ago, now it’s 8.6 billion miles from the Earth. Launched in 1977, Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1, explored the giant planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune and kept on going. Nearly 33 years later, they are the most distant human-made objects. Voyager has recently begun sending back data messages NASA scientists can’t decode. This began on April 22nd.
But now the spacecraft is sending back what sounds like an answer to our greetings: Signals in an unknown data format!
The spacecraft late last month began sending science data 8.6 billion miles to Earth in a changed format that mission managers could not decode
The best scientific minds have so far not been able to decipher the strange information – is it a secret message?
To try and understand the problem, engineers at JPL have shifted the spacecraft into a mode where it transmits only spacecraft health and status data. Preliminary engineering data received on May 1 show the spacecraft is basically healthy.
Alien expert Hartwig Hausdorf (54, ‘UFOs – They Are Still Flying’) said: “It seems almost as if someone had reprogrammed or hijacked the probe – thus perhaps we do not yet know the whole truth…”
Right now, the probe is near the turbulent sector of space where the solar wind pushes up against interstellar space. It iz expected to cross into interstellar space within the next few years, providing our first in-place observational data from outside the solar system. It will also record what happens at the boundary itself—they may cross it several times, given that its precise location fluctuates with changes in solar activity.
Up until the summer of 2007 Voyager 2, despite being over 7 billion miles from the Sun, was still traveling inside an enormous magnetic bubble around the Sun known as the heliosphere. The bubble is formed by the ”solar wind – high energy particles shooting out from the Sun that push out the interstellar medium coming in from beyond the solar system. But somewhere far beyond the orbit of Pluto the solar wind collides head on with the interstellar medium, causing the particles that were traveling outwards from the Sun at a million miles an hour to abruptly slow down to subsonic speeds. That outer envelope of the heliosphere, where the solar wind collides head-on with the interstellar medium is known as the termination shock.
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