The spacecraft is operating properly, but it's confused about its location.
"We have a problem with the Voyager 1 spacecraft," Thomas Zurbuchen, NASA's associate administrator for the Science Mission Directorate, said at a meeting of the National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine's Space Studies Board on Thursday , where he offered more details about the situation and what it might mean for the mission.
Getting to the bottom of this confusion is no easy matter, however, due to the vast distance between Earth and Voyager 1, meaning long delays in the time it takes to communicate with Voyager 1, almost making the spacecraft a victim of its longevity."Imagine you have a conversation with somebody in which you can only say a word every day," Zurbuchen said."And you only hear back every other day. That's the kind of discussion that we have.
Zurbuchen is confident that the Voyager team will solve the mystery, but noted that the spacecraft cannot continue forever. In addition to the current communications issue, Voyager 1 is also running at much colder temperatures than it was designed to because of the decay of the spacecraft's nuclear power source.