NASA's Voyager 1 from the '70s is in trouble. Engineers are consulting a 45 year old manual to troubleshoot.
In May, NASA scientists said the Voyager 1 spacecraft was sending back inaccurate data from its attitude control system. The mysterious error is still ongoing, according to the mission’s engineering team. Now, to find a fix, engineers are digging into decades-old manuals. Voyager 1, along with its twin Voyager 2, was launched in 1977 with a five-year design lifetime to study Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and their respective moons up close. After nearly 45 years in space, both spacecraft are still functioning. In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first man-made object to venture beyond the limits of our sun’s influence, known as the heliopause, and into interstellar space. It is now about 14.5 billion miles from Earth and sending data back from outside the solar system. “No one thought it would last that long,” Suzanne Dodd, project manager for the Voyager mission at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, told Insider, adding, “And here we are.” Voyager 1 was designed and built in the earl