Voyager 1 back online after months sending gibberish

(NewsNation) — NASA’s Voyager 1 probe is once again sending information to scientists after months of issues where the 46-year-old craft was sending incomprehensible messages back to Earth.

The probe is the first human-made object to have left the solar system, and engineers managed to do long-distance troubleshooting over more than 15 billion miles to partially restore the probe’s 1970s-era computer.

A team with NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory recoded part of the memory on the craft’s Flight Data Subsystem to try to solve the problem that began in November 2023, when the probe stopped sending data about the craft’s health and measurements from scientific instruments, instead delivering an unintelligible stream of data.

It takes more than 22 hours for a radio signal to cover the distance between Earth and Voyager 1, which is still flying on an outbound trajectory in interstellar space, so it took two days for engineers to send the command and get a response back.

The fix means the FDS is now sending back engineering data on Voyager 1’s status, including information like power signals. According to scientists, the probe is still in good shape as it was before the glitch.

Scientists believe a chip that stored part of the FDS memory stopped working, either because of a cosmic ray hit or because it simply failed due to age, which affected some of the code.

There’s still more work to be done to get Voyager 1 back completely and once again get scientific data from the probe. Because of Voyager 1’s age, much of the code and documentation is still on paper and hasn’t been digitized, meaning it still could take weeks to get through the next steps.

Voyager 1 has long completed its initial mission to fly by Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980 before heading to the edge of the solar system. It and twin probe Voyager 2 are the only probes flying in interstellar space, and NASA has been using them to study cosmic rays, the magnetic field and the plasma environment.

While any data collected since the probe began experiencing issues in November has been lost, NASA scientists are eager to get new data flowing back again and continue to learn more about what space is like beyond our solar system.

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