May 25, 2022
Enjoy these interesting stories from the scientific community.
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*-- Crews remove last functioning pay phone in New York City --*
Officials held a ceremony Monday for removal of the last public pay phone stall in New York City.
The pay phone was removed with a crane from a sidewalk on 7th Ave. and 50th St. in Midtown Manhattan, just south of Times Square, marking what officials called "the end of the pay phone era."
Officials said it was the last public pay phone in the city, but there are still privately owned pay phones and four permanent, full-length "Superman" phone booths.
The city began removing the pay phones in 2015 as they became obsolete and replacing them with public Wi-Fi hotspots.
Since then, the city has removed thousands of pay phones across all five boroughs.
In 2014, there were more than 6,000 active public pay telephones on city sidewalks, according to the city website. They were originally slated to be removed by 2020, but the process took longer than expected.
City officials said on the website that the public pay phones, which provided free access to 911 and 311 non-emergency city services, were still used for regular calls and long-distance calls, but their usage had gone way down.
Instead of the pay phones, now, there are thousands of wireless kiosks run by LinkNYC across the five boroughs, according to the city Office of Technology and Innovation.
LinkNYC officials said there will 5G functionality added to the kiosks this summer, which also provide a social services directory, device charging, free domestic calls and transit and weather alerts.
"We celebrate the end of the pay phone," but also "look forward to new beginnings," said the city's chief technology officer, Matthew Fraser, 1010WINS reported.
*-- NASA engineers investigate Voyager 1 spacecraft data mystery --*
 NASA engineers are investigating a mystery with telemetry data from the aging Voyager 1 probe.
The Voyager 1 probe, currently 14.5 billion miles from Earth, is receiving and executing commands from NASA team on Earth and sending back science data, according to a NASA statement.
But data readouts from its attitude articulation and control system, or AACS, which controls the spacecraft's orientation, don't reflect what the Voyager actually does, engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory said.
The AACS keeps Voyager 1's high-gain antenna pointed precisely at Earth, which allows it to send data home.
Voyager 1's signal hasn't weakened, which suggests its antenna remains properly aligned, but the telemetry data it's returning appears random or impossible, engineers said.
All signs suggest that the AACS is working, and the telemetry data anomaly hasn't triggered any onboard fault protection systems, which would put the spacecraft into "safe mode," where only essential operations could be performed.
The engineering team plans to continue monitoring the signal to determine whether the invalid telemetry data is coming directly from AACS or another system involved in producing and sending such data.
Due to the spacecraft's distance from Earth, it takes two days for the team on the ground to send a message to Voyager 1 and get a response.
"Until the nature of the issue is better understood, the team cannot anticipate whether this might affect how long the spacecraft can collect and transmit science data," NASA and JPL said in the statement.
The Voyager probes -- Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, launched in 1977 -- are shown at the edge of the heliosphere, the barrier the Sun creates around the planets in the solar system. Image courtesy of NASA
Voyager 1's twin, Voyager 2, currently 12.1 billion miles from Earth, still operates normally.
Both probes were launched in 1977 and are the only spacecraft to collect data on interstellar space, according to NASA.
They've also provided new insights into the heliosphere, a protective bubble the Sun has created that extends past the orbit of Pluto.
"A mystery like this is sort of par for the course at this stage of the Voyager mission," said Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager 1 and 2 at JPL.
"The spacecraft are both almost 45 years old, which is far beyond what mission planners anticipated. We're also in interstellar space -- a high radiation environment that no spacecraft have flown in before. So there are some big challenges for the engineering team. But I think if there's a way to solve this issue with the AACS, our team will find it."
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