A mystery Voyager 1 glitch? NASA working to understand strange data....

Credits:
An artist's depiction of the Voyager 1 spacecraft. (Image credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Spending 45 years traversing the solar system really does a number on a spacecraft.

NASA's Voyager 1 mission launched in 1977, passed into what scientists call interstellar space in 2012 and just kept going - the spacecraft is now 14.5 billion miles (23.3 billion kilometers) away from Earth. And while Voyager 1 is still operating properly, scientists on the mission recently noticed that it appeared confused about its location in space without going into safe mode or otherwise sounding an alarm.

"A mystery like this is sort of par for the course at this stage of the Voyager mission," Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California, said in a statement.