Daily Archives

12 May 2010

Uh, media spotlight over here?

At least according to the Australians, the Voyager 2 spacecraft has been hacked by aliens and is beaming back a signal to Earth that has been indecipherable for the last few weeks.  Despite a few launch difficulties, scientists have been able to get 33 years of stellar (pun intended) performance from a piece of 70s technology intended to last for 4 years – making it difficult to understand why the Voyager probe is now feeding only unreadable material to NASA.

So what’s going on?  Remember:

Each Voyager space probe carries a gold-plated audio-visual disc in the event that either spacecraft is ever found by intelligent life-forms […]

Is it possible that, on its way to Sirius, Voyager 2 encountered something or someone?  What’s going on in the heliosphere, anyway?  And where is Arthur C. Clarke when you need him?

(Thanks The Daily Telegraph, NASA and Wikipedia)