Elijah Williams
The most distant spacecraft from Earth has resumed sending data after a five-month gap, NASA said Monday.
from NASA Voyager 1 spacecraft was launched in 1977, about two weeks after the launch of its twin sister, Voyager 2. The spacecraft spent more than 45 years studying the outer solar system and made flybys of Jupiter and Saturn and traveled more than 46,000,000,000 miles.
In November 2023, the spacecraft stopped sending “readable science and engineering data,” NASA said in a press release. Mission controllers were able to determine that Voyager 1 was still receiving commands from Earth and operating normally, but the scientific data could not be read and researchers did not know the status of the engineering systems aboard the spacecraft.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Last month, the spacecraft’s engineering team was able to confirm that the problem was related to one of the three onboard computers that make up Voyager 1’s flight data subsystem. This system is what packages scientific and engineering data into one readable format before sending them to Earth. The team determined that “a single chip responsible for storing a portion of (the system’s) memory,” including some computer software code, was not working.
The chip could not be repaired and the code was too large to be placed in a new location, NASA said, so the team worked to relocate the affected code into various sections of the flight data subsystem. It took weeks to repackage the code, NASA said, and last Thursday, the new location was communicated to Voyager 1.
It takes about 22 and a half hours for a radio signal to reach Voyager 1 in interstellar space, or the space between the stars, NASA said. On Saturday, the spacecraft mission team received a response confirming that the code modification worked.
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Engineers celebrated receiving new data for the first time in almost half a year, but the work is not yet complete. NASA said that in the coming weeks, the mission team will “relocate and adjust other affected parts” of the software, including parts that will begin returning scientific data. About that, Traveler 2 continues to operate smoothly and both ships will continue to report from the distant reaches of the solar system.
