Inverse - 🛰 NASA gets Voyager 1 talking again

Thursday

Sept 01 2022

Billions of miles from Earth in the interstellar medium, NASA can hear Voyager scream. Sort of. Now some 14.6 billion miles from Earth and careering on into the deep every day, Voyager 1 is in a perilous state. Any error is a big problem for NASA — and errors do happen. When the spacecraft sent back garbled messages to NASA back in May, you might've thought it was a death rattle. We don't know what will finally put an end to this record-breaking mission, but here's the good news: Voyager 1 is back to making sense. But there is a twist.

Keep scrolling to find out what mystery lies far out in space and so much more. And enjoy your long weekend! This is our last newsletter of the week due to Labor Day. We're going to the beach. We'll be back on Tuesday!

What's New

DISTANT TRAVELLER

Science

NASA gets Voyager 1 talking again — and discovers a new mystery

NASA’s Voyager 1 is on a fraught and unknowable journey into deep space. Some 14.6 billion miles from Earth, it and its sister craft, Voyager 2, are the furthest human-made objects from our planet, having made it beyond the edges of the Solar System and out into the interstellar medium.

At such distances, anything can go wrong. Add to that the fact that these are old craft: The Voyagers launched in the 1970s. So when Voyager 1 started to send home weird, garbled nonsense instead of telemetry data in May of this year, NASA engineers might have been forgiven for calling it a day and pouring one out for perhaps the most successful space mission of all time.

But that’s not how NASA works. Instead, they started working on a remote diagnosis and fix for the record-breaking spacecraft. Now, some four months later, they are triumphant. Voyager 1 is back online and communicating perfectly with ground control as if it never happened. In fact, the fix turned out to be relatively simple — or as simple as anything can be with a 22-hour communications lag in each direction and billions of miles of space in between.

Learn more

AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY

Television

How Rings of Power’s Harfoots differ from Tolkien’s Hobbits

In the series set several millennia before The Hobbit, the societies that dot Middle-earth are a tad different from the ones fans know. For one thing, there aren’t Hobbits anywhere. But there are Harfoots, a nomadic society who are comparatively more attuned to the Earth, as evidenced by their hair adorned with leaves (which happen to make good camouflage for hiding).

One Harfoot the show follows is Nori Brandyfoot, a young thrill-seeker played by Markella Kavenagh.

“We’ve seen Hobbits before,” Kavenagh tells Inverse. “The main similarity is in their physicality. They have the feet. They have the ears. But the main difference lies in their circumstances.”

While the Hobbits have the Shire to call home, Kavenagh says Harfoots “are very much looking and actively searching for their one stable sense of place.” In the meantime, they are nomads who zig-zag across Middle-earth and “move with the seasons.”

Look:

Science

82 species chronicle Earth's latest mass extinction

As a species, Homo sapiens wield incredible power over the fate of life on Earth.

Our industrialized world has caused unprecedented destruction to wildlife. But people have also intervened to bring species back from the brink of extinction, and restore struggling ecosystems.

The consequential relationship between ourselves and nature is the subject of a decade-long project published in the new book Extinction: Our Fragile Relationship with Life on Earth.

Photographer Marc Schlossman spent ten years photographing collections of birds, reptiles, mammals, and more at Chicago’s Field Museum. Many of the 82 species he photographed are extinct.

Schlossman tells Inverse that he hopes the book helps people both visualize biodiversity loss and understand its main causes.

Take a closer look

AN UNEXPECTED JOURNEY

Television

How Rings of Power tweaks one of Tolkien’s oldest traditions

In 2017, upon the posthumous publication of Tolkien’s The Tale of Beren and Luthien, The New Republic writer Jo Livingstone observed the meaning of romance in J.R.R. Tolkien’s famous saga, the Lord of the Rings.

On the romance of Arwen and Aragorn, Livingstone says their love “gives emotional and narrative depth” to the action, while their marriage represents an “everlasting bond between their two races.”

“Romance, in fact, lies at the center of the Lord of the Rings mythology,” Livingstone wrote.

A romance between an elf and a mortal human continues (or, technically, preludes) in The Lord of the Rings: The Rings of Power, streaming September 2 on Prime Video. But one doesn’t simply get a love story retold.

In an interview with Inverse, The Rings of Power stars Ismael Cruz Córdova and Nazanin Boniadi tease how the epic prequel brings a fresh spin — one centered on class and privilege — to one of Tolkien’s most popular motifs.

1, 2, 3...

Innovation

This satellite will count every single tree on Earth

In 2018, scientists published the results of a years-long quest to tally up the weight of every single living thing on Earth. They tried to guess how much carbon sits inside our planet’s biomass — the trees, ants, whales, mushrooms, bacteria, and other creatures that call Earth home.

Their final count put Earth’s biomass at 550 billion tons of carbon. Of that half-trillion tons, plants accounted for more than 80 percent.

But that estimate is likely wrong, the authors noted. Measuring biomass at such a massive scale is inherently difficult, they write. Today, we still don’t have a handle on the exact amount of life that dots the planet.

The European Space Agency’s Biomass satellite may be up to the job. The upcoming mission, which is planned to launch in early 2024, will monitor Earth’s forests in unprecedented detail.

The satellite consists of a 40-foot-wide reflector suspended on a boom over its rectangular body — the whole thing looks like a ginormous umbrella shielding our planet.

Learn more

Meanwhile...

Understand the world through 8 images captured this week

'She-Hulk' Episode 3 Easter egg solves a major X-Men MCU mystery

'The Last of Us Part I' is as close to perfection as it gets

6 incredible sci-fi shows and movies coming to Netflix in September 2022

Today in history: In a search led by American Robert Ballard, the wreck of the Titanic was found on the ocean floor at a depth of about 13,000 feet on September 1, 1985.

Song of the day: "Voyager," Daft Punk

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Inverse - 🛰 NASA gets Voyager 1 talking again

Older messages

🍿 'The Rings of Power' is a new fantasy classic in the making

🚀 Failure to launch

🐉 More dragons incoming

🧠 Let’s talk about emotional intelligence

🍄 Psilocybin's medical potential

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