45-year-old voyager 1, the information sent back was confused. What did he encounter in deep space?

According to the news from NASA, voyager 1, the human AI emissary who is flying out of the solar system, recently sent back some disordered data, and the readings did not correctly reflect the actual situation of the spacecraft. This spaceship, the farthest from human beings, has been flying in space alone for 45 years. What has it encountered?

now, let's take a look at its general trajectory in the past decades, as well as what is happening at present and its future direction.

this unmanned probe launched in 1977 has been 23.3 billion kilometers away from us, and it is still flying out of the solar system at a speed of 16.9 kilometers per second. Some people say that it has already flown out of the solar system, while others think that it is still early. This is because there are several different understandings about where the boundary of the solar system is.

One kind of understanding is that Neptune's orbit is the boundary, because Neptune is the largest planet farthest from the sun, and no major planet has been found out of this orbit. Neptune's orbit is about 3AU from the sun. AU is an astronomical unit, and 1 astronomical unit is equal to the average distance from the sun to the earth, about 15 million kilometers.

voyager 1 flew over Neptune's orbit in the late 198s, and did a romantic thing on Valentine's Day in 199. He glanced back and took a photo of us 6.4 billion kilometers away from the Earth.

This photo is considered shocking, and it is difficult to find the shadow of the earth in the vast space with the returned image, because the earth is not as good as a dust at 6.4 billion kilometers, with only .12 pixels and a faint light spot. This photo is called "dim blue spot". (Above)

People are shocked and introspected because there are more than 7 billion people living on this seemingly smaller particle than dust. These people are fighting for survival or interests there, full of plagues and wars.

This is the last photo sent by voyager 1, and he never looked back and ran away.

Beyond Neptune is the Kuiper Belt, which is an ice world very far from the sun. There are many icy asteroids, the smallest of which is only meters, and the largest is a dwarf planet. Pluto is one of the largest dwarf planets. These are celestial bodies in the solar system, so it seems inappropriate to say that they are outside the solar system.

another understanding is that the boundary of the solar system is at the top of the solar wind, also called the top of the solar sphere, which is the farthest point where charged particles of the sun blow. The charged particle stream thrown by the solar corona forms a spherical bubble around the sun. The ball is very large, with a radius of about 12AU and a thickness of about .5AU.

on November 7th, 211, voyager 1 was about 119.488AU away from us, and it was considered to have reached the transition zone of the solar system edge, where the solar wind had become very slow. At this time, the speed of voyager 1 is 17.62 kilometers per second, and it takes more than 16 hours for the information sent back to Earth at the speed of light.

at 2pm local time on September 12th, 213, NASA officially confirmed through a press conference that voyager 1 has left the solar system and entered interstellar space, based on the fact that the solar wind detected by voyager 1 is getting slower and slower, and there are fewer and fewer particles from the sun, and more and more particles from the interstellar space. Eventually, there will be no solar particles, all of which are interstellar particles.

Some people in the scientific community think that this is a symbol of separation from the solar system, but others think that the solar system should be bounded by Oort Cloud. Oort cloud is a scientific conjecture that a dense small celestial body surrounds the solar system in a spherical shape. The radius of this sphere reaches 1 light year, which is more than 6, AU.

This sphere with a radius of 1 light-year is the sphere of influence of the sun's gravity. In this sphere is a dark world of ice and snow, which is called Huixin Home. Because it is far away from the sun, it is extremely cold and dark. When the solar system was formed in the early years, the water vapor blown here by the stellar wind condensed into a mixture of snow, ice and dust, which is called dirty snowballs. These are comet nuclei.

There are more than one trillion of these nuclei in Oort Cloud. Some of them roll bigger and bigger like snowballs, and some collide and break. When it is ejected from the established orbit by the gravitational force of some big celestial bodies, it may be absorbed by the gravitational force of the sun. When it is observed by people on earth near the sun, the light and heat of the sun have evaporated these dirty snowballs out of the coma and tail, and they will sweep across the sky like a huge broom, and they will be called comets when they are observed by people.

This range is generally regarded as the final margin of the solar system, and it will take more than 17, years for voyager 1 to fly out of this margin at its current speed. In this sense, it is still a long way for voyager 1 to fly out of the solar system.

the last time NASA manipulated voyager 1 was on November 28th, 217. This was because the information sent back by NASA engineers from voyager 1 at that time found that the function of its main engine was weakened. In order to correct this problem, it was instructed to start the auxiliary engine that had been dormant for more than 3 years.

At that time, voyager 1 was more than 2 billion kilometers away from the Earth, and it took more than 19 hours for the instruction to be transmitted to voyager 1. It takes more than 38 hours to go once, and the returning galaxy shows that voyager 1 has carried out this command accurately and reported that four auxiliary engines are working normally.

This is the farthest mission for human beings to command man-made objects by remote control. Since then, voyager 1 has never been manipulated again, and it flies out of the solar system completely by inertia and the determined course. Its battery energy is very low, and it can't be supplemented by solar energy in the distant and dark deep space, so the various instruments it carries can't work gradually.

In fact, since 27, in order to save electricity, voyager 1 has begun to gradually shut down scientific instruments and stop various experimental activities, namely: in 27, the operation of plasma subsystem was stopped; In 28, the planetary radio astronomy experiment was stopped; In 21, the scanning platform and ultraviolet spectrometer were stopped; In 215, the operation of the data tape drive was stopped; In 216, the gyro operation was stopped; In 22, scientific instruments began to be closed.

However, voyager 1 has left some basic instruments to work, and they are still faithfully sending data information all the time, reporting its flight status and new things to its owners. On the voyager 1 page of NASA website, the real-time data of travelers are jumping every second, as shown in the screenshot below:

Therefore, now the news of travelers only comes back, and the owners of the earth can passively accept the information sent back by it, but it is difficult to give instructions to it. In the dark and deep space full of risks, this loyal human messenger can only go forward and fly to the unknown distance, and how far he can fly depends entirely on luck.

voyager 1's information transmission will come to an abrupt end in 225. Because this year, voyager 1's electricity will be completely exhausted, and it will be unable to start any more instruments. The kite was completely broken and unknown, and people never heard from it again.

But voyager 1 will not stop there. It will still fly towards Centauri. After more than 7, years, it will reach the nearest star system, the proxima centauri system, which is 4.22 light years away. As a human messenger, it will see what is there, and then continue to fly to the center of the Milky Way.

In the high vacuum state of space, voyager 1's body will not be oxidized, so it can theoretically exist for more than one billion years as long as there are no accidents. It carries a piece of high-purity U-238, and the half-life of this radioactive element decaying into plutonium -239 is 4.17 billion years. Therefore, when voyager 1 was lucky enough to meet an alien and was captured by the alien, he could calculate the age of the human messenger from the decay variable of this uranium -238.

Aliens can also read the coordinates of the solar system and the earth, the appearance of the earth and human beings, the living conditions of various races and the information of the earth's ecology from the golden records carried by voyager 1. When these aliens find human beings according to voyager 1's guidance, we will know what happened to the AI ancestor sent by human beings after he left human sight.

However, it's hard to say whether humans existed or not at that time, or whether they had migrated to other planets.

according to the news released by NASA, the current operation of voyager 1 seems to be still normal, but "the readings of the attitude expression and control system (AACS) of the detector do not reflect what actually happened on board".

The so-called AACS is a device to control the direction of voyager 1. In addition, it can make the high-gain antenna accurately point to the earth, so that the data can be sent to the owner in time. Now all the signs show that AACS is still working, and the high-gain antenna is also pointing to the earth accurately, otherwise it will not receive the information sent back by it.

However, the telemetry data sent back by it seems to be randomly generated, which fails to reflect the real state of the spacecraft. According to the intelligent setting, if something goes wrong, the system will put the spacecraft into "safe mode", which will give the engineers of the task team time to diagnose the problem. But voyager 1 did not enter the "safe mode", which puzzled the engineers.

Is voyager 1 "old" and "senile dementia"? But this is obviously impossible, because as mentioned earlier, it can fly in space for 1 billion years without King Kong being bad, and it is still a baby. But on the other hand, its energy is almost exhausted, so it is reasonable to make a little temper if you want the horse to run and not eat grass.

at present, the engineering team has been closely monitoring the signal, and may start the final correction of voyager 1 if it finds the problem? Now voyager 1 is 23.3 billion kilometers away from the Earth, and the speed of light takes 2 hours and 33 minutes to travel through this space, so it takes more than 21 hours for every message from voyager 1 to come back.

The task team has long been used to this delay effect. When they decide to correct voyager 1, the instructions will take more than 21 hours to arrive. But this is not a problem. If necessary, these "parents" who have taken good care of voyager 1 for decades will be happy to help their children tide over the difficulties.

As a bystander, there is nothing I can do to help voyager 1. I can only silently wish you a safe journey. What do you think of this? Welcome to the discussion and thank you for reading.