Dr. Robert Dupont, associate administrator of the Space Operations Mission Directorate, was in a state of shock along with his team. They didn’t want to believe what they just found. He called the Office of Administrator for an emergency meeting.

He hurried towards the small conference room where Chief of Staff and Deputy Administrator were already waiting.

“Dr. Dupont! Is there any progress?” asked Brenda Howard, Deputy Administrator. “You guys look excited” she added.
“Excited? or Shocked? We are not really sure” replied without any emotions on his face.
“Miss Howard. Is Mr. Bolden authorized to access the military intelligence?” he asked.
“Even if I am authorized, I am not authorized to tell you that.” quipped Charles Bolden, NASA administrator who just entered the room. “Why do you want to know that fact anyway?”
“Nothing Mr Bolden. Just to verify some facts.”
“What facts?”
“We traced that signal that’s bothering us.” started Dr. Dupont. “The source of the signal….”

“Will you please explain the whole situation. I am just aware that there was a problem in your mission, so I don’t think I quite understood what you just said” interrupted Mr. Bolden.

“OK. Well. Three weeks ago, our Voyager team had some problems with both the probes.” he began his informal presentation. “Sometimes, some of our commands were not understood properly by one of or both the probes. There was no definite pattern of the commands that were neglected nor of the time a command was received by them nor of the position of those probes. They were very random and frequent occurrences. Generally, as you know, we attribute this lack of understanding to significant noise received by the space probes. Our sun is the biggest noise source that can affect such space probes. But the solar storms are at their minimum and really couldn’t have caused the noise that’s bothering us.”

Dupont raised from his seat and started walking toward the white board. “So we stopped all transmission for the last six days in order to let both the Voyager probes record the noise signals and track its possible source. We relayed it to us for analysis. To our surprise, the signal is getting weaker day by day. The signal was stronger in Voyager One’s records than Voyager Two’s. ”

“How are you sure that the space probes are actually doing what you are expecting them to do at this point? you just said they weren’t able to understand some commands.” asked the chief of staff.

“In deep space exploration probes, we generally dont maintain frequent contact with the probe. The probe sleeps most of the time and collects data only when awaken by our commands. This process is done only thrice a week to conserve power. When I used the word ‘frequent’ I was talking relatively and yes, it is more frequent than our scheduled plan of commands. But when we increase our time period of contact with the probe, those random occurrences are insignificant. The situation is critical as we might even lose the probes if these misunderstandings occur ‘frequently’ when compared to our schedule at a later stage of the mission.”

Everyone nodded.

“So, we had two approaches at this point. a) we find the source and hopefully if it is not in the same direction as that of Earth, we reduce the listening capacity of the probe’s antennas in that direction. or b) we try to find a pattern in the signal and predict it to reduce the interference in future samples.”

“Two teams worked on both these approaches. Team B found that those signals are of frequency modulated.”

“What!!” asked both Brenda Howard and Charles Bolden in unison. “Is that one of our FM signals? I thought you guys use GHz signals for deep space operations.” Bolden added.

“Yes Mr. Bolden, but signals can be modulated to any higher frequency. As you know, our terrestrial FM signals are carried in MHz but this particular FM signal is in GHz. After demodulating that very weak signal we heard some sounds. We are not sure about the language. So we sent the samples to Center for Applied Linguistics for identification. All of them confirmed that it is not any of the major languages used in space faring nations.”

“What about India and China? Are you sure they checked all those languages? ” asked the chief of staff.
“Only a few languages of those countries can be understood by the entire nation. So its highly unlikely that they used some of their less spoken languages.” Dupont assured. “Moreover both those countries don’t have the capability to send space crafts to the other side of the sun. …”

“Other side the sun?” interjected Howard. “Do you mean the source is on the other side of sun?”

“Exactly. The mysterious signal is on the other side of our Sun.”