Earlier this year, NASA’s Voyager 1 engineering team discovered a problem : The spacecraft was functioning properly, receiving and executing commands from Earth while collecting and sending back scientific data. But the spacecraft Attitude Articulation and Control System (AACS) read incorrectly. AACS controls the direction of the spacecraft, ensuring that the antenna is pointed precisely at Earth so it can send data back to Earth. Now that NASA engineers have declared the problem fixed, the failure was caused by a computer that stopped working years ago, and the AACS itself is working fine. Voyager 1 has been working for 45 years and is currently 23.3 billion kilometers away from the earth. It takes 20 hours and 33 minutes to travel this distance. NASA engineers said the spacecraft had a lot of problems: 4 watts of power were lost a year, propellant pipes were about to freeze, and there were problems with the computer chips. Engineers are trying to keep a classic car going tens of billions of kilometers away.
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