NASA engineers had good news to share after receiving decipherable data from Voyager 1 for the first time in months.
The space agency has been working for the past five months to fix an issue with the device that is currently about 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away from Earth. On Monday, April 22, the space agency was able to announce that they succeeded in checking “the health and status of the most distant human-made object in existence.”
"Today was a great day for Voyager 1," Linda Spilker, Voyager project scientist at JPL, said in a statement, as quoted by CNN. "We're back in communication with the spacecraft. And we look forward to getting science data back."
The 46-year-old spaceship stopped sending readable data back to Earth on November 14, 2023. Controllers could tell that the spaceship was receiving their command, but the system was stuck in a loop of sending an indecipherable pattern of code back.
NASA shared an important update about Voyager 1, "the most distant human-made object in existence”
Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
The engineering team discovered in March that the problem was with a crucial chip inside one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers called the flight data subsystem (FDS). It is the FDS that is responsible for packaging the data before it is shot back to Earth.
“The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working,” NASA said in its statement.
The space agency then ingeniously crafted a coding solution that successfully navigated through the 46-year-old computer system and restored the proper receiving of data from Voyager 1.
"For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems,” NASA happily announced in the Monday statement. “The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars)."
After about five months of not receiving decipherable data from Voyager 1, the controllers managed to fix the issue and restore proper communication
Image credits: NASA/JPL-Caltech
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 is a pioneering space probe currently making its way through interstellar space. It is the human-made object that is the farthest away from the Earth and continues to transmit valuable data back to scientists, offering a peek into the outer reaches of our solar system and beyond.
As both the voyagers travel through space, scientists have encountered problems with communication in the past as well. There was a seven-month period in 2020 when the team at NASA was not receiving communication from Voyager 2. But issues such as these have been dealt with along the way.
“We never know for sure what’s going to happen with the Voyagers, but it constantly amazes me when they just keep going,” Voyager Project Manager Suzanne Dodd was quoted saying. “We’ve had many anomalies, and they are getting harder. But we’ve been fortunate so far to recover from them. And the mission keeps going. And younger engineers are coming onto the Voyager team and contributing their knowledge to keep the mission going.”
Space enthusiasts were ecstatic to hear the update, as the spaceship can now continue sending vital insights from the outer reaches of the solar system and beyond
