2 will be within 1.7 ly of Ross 248 (another star which is approaching the Sun) and in 296,000 years it will pass within 4.6 ly of Sirius which is the brightest star in the night sky. The spacecraft are not expected to collide with a star for 1 sextillion (1020) years. In October 2020, astronomers reported a significant unexpected increase in density in the space beyond the Solar System as detected by the Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 space probes. According to the researchers, this implies that "the density gradient is a large-scale feature of the VLISM (very local interstellar medium) in the general direction of the heliospheric nose". Telemetry The telemetry comes to the telemetry modulation unit (TMU) separately as a "low-rate" 40-bit-per-second (bit/s) channel and a "high-rate" channel. Low rate telemetry is routed through the TMU such that it can only be downlinked as uncoded bits (in other words there is no error correction). At high rate, one of a set of rates between 10 bit/s and 115.2 kbit/s is downlinked as coded symbols. The TMU encodes the high rate data stream with a convolutional code having constraint length of 7 with a symbol rate equal to twice the bit rate (k=7, r=1/2) Voyager telemetry operates at these transmission rates: 7200, 1400 bit/s tape recorder playbacks 600 bit/s real-time fields, particles, and waves; full UVS; engineering 160 bit/s real-time fields, particles, and waves; UVS subset; engineering 40 bit/s real-time engineering data, no science data. Note: At 160 and 600 bit/s different data types are interleaved. The Voyager craft have three different telemetry formats: High rate CR-5T (ISA 35395) Science, note that this can contain some engineering data. FD-12 higher accuracy (and time resolution) Engineering data, note that some science data may also be encoded. Low rate EL-40 Engineering, note that this format can contain some science data, but not all systems represented.This is an abbreviated format, with data truncation for some subsystems. It is understood that there is substantial overlap of EL-40 and CR-5T (ISA 35395) telemetry, but the simpler EL-40 data does not have the resolution of the CR-5T telemetry. At least when it comes to representing available electricity to subsystems, EL-40 only transmits in integer increments—so similar behaviors are expected elsewhere. Memory dumps are available in both engineering formats. These routine diagnostic procedures have detected and corrected intermittent memory bit flip problems, as well as