“No signal? Can you explain?” someone at the table asked.
“I have many versions of this incident, and the official NASA position is one of the memory clusters was damaged. That’s right, the device was damaged, but how it happened we can’t explain. The fact is that according to the data we were able to reconstruct, it turns out that the device was not moving in space for about 36 minutes.”
“Charley, didn’t move in space?” Jean-Jacques Dordain clarified.
“Yes,” Charles Bolden swiped his face, “it stopped.”
People in the hall began to look at each other and murmured.
“Have I got that right?” looking around the hall, Mr. Dordain said. “Voyager 2 stopped for 36 minutes on approach to Uranus? You mean… stopped at all?”
“We have the trajectory reports, the mission correction due to the 36 minute gap, and the program to exclude the damaged cluster from the transmission,” Charles Bolden pulled the documents out of a folder.
“But Voyager 2 has continued on its way, right? It’s in communication.” asked a representative of the Chinese agency.
“Yes,” Mr. Bolden turned around, “that’s right. The spacecraft has got back up to speed without any action on our part. Until this week, NASA believed that the discrepancy was tentative due to the desynchronization of the spacecraft with the control center.”
There was a pause in the room. Then the hubbub and commotion began to grow. Jean-Jacques Dordain collapsed in his seat. One of the American generals turned on his microphone:
“This information is raw, Mr. Bolden just wanted to say…” his voice drowned in the noise of the crowd.
After a moment, everyone’s confusion turned into a thirst for information.
“All right,” Mr. Dordain turned on his microphone, “all right, you have spatial telemetry. According to this data, Voyager hasn’t moved for 36 minutes, and you have a damaged memory sector on your device. Don’t you think that’s a transmission error.”
“That’s exactly what we told everyone,” Charles Bolden replied. “Corrected the course and continued the mission.”
“And now we have a recording from this device broadcasted somewhere in the Himalayas?” said the Indian general.
“Gentlemen,” the Russian general interrupted them, “in a couple of hours the Nepalese army together with our scientists will survey the square. Let’s not go crazy. It is not a fact that these things are related.”