Posted on 05/13/2010 8:28:07 AM PDT by Braak
IT left Earth 33 years ago, now it's claimed the Voyager 2 spacecraft may have been hijacked by aliens after sending back data messages NASA scientists can't decode.
NASA installed a 12-inch disk containing music and greetings in 55 languages in case intelligent extraterrestrial life ever found it.
But now the spacecraft is sending back what sounds like an answer: Signals in an unknown data format!
The best scientific minds have so far not been able to decipher the strange information – is it a secret message?
Alien expert Hartwig Hausdorf said:"It seems almost as if someone had reprogrammed or hijacked the probe – thus perhaps we do not yet know the whole truth" Read more in Bild
Engineers are working to solve the data transmissions from the Voyager 2 spacecraft near the edge of the solar system, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said today.
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.
Engineers have since instructed Voyager 2 to only transmit data on its own health and status while they work on the problem.
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 1 is 10.5 billion miles from Earth and in about five years is expected to pass through the heliosphere, a bubble the sun creates around the solar system, and enter interstellar space.
Voyager 2 will follow after that.
Election repercussions are big.
I decoded it. “How to Serve Man”
Uh, expert in something that so far, only exists in fiction? I’m going with data corruption...Nothing we have has really gone that far...except Voyager 1...and last I heard, we’re not in contact with it at all....
How does one become an alien expert when we have had no proven contact with any [space] aliens? UK educational grant money at work?
“Send more Chuck Berry”.
Check it for backwards masking...
Are they having a deep-space Saturnalia?
Of course it has a mundane explanation. For aliens to send us messages through the spacecraft would be like sending text messages to someone sitting right next to you.
I’m guessing a combination of distance and an extremely harsh environment are likely explanations. Also we have no idea how many micrometeorite impacts the craft has suffered.
Depending on how rad-hardened the components are, I’m guessing it has a suffered a few DBEs. Some encoders/decoders in the transmit chain are hosed.
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Sounds like the kind of sources once quoted by the Weekly World News.
Is this thread another Star Treck rerun?
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They’ve no managed to translate the data.
It says “send more Chuck Berry”
Coming now...
I....buried....Paul....
They don’t talk about data corruption as much as unknown data format. Any computer science expert can tell whether there is a format to data—there must be some kind of form or regularity with the data for them not to declare that it is simply corrupted.
Well, I must admit that I thought, back when Voyager II was launched, that it’s somewhat naive to send out a primitive spacecraft broadcasting to all and sundry: “We’re here! We’re here! Come and get us!”
We’re lucky if all that’s happened is that some alien race is using it as an advertising gadget for intergalactic soap.
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