NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, the most distant human-made object in space, has resumed communication after a tense five-month period of confusing communications. In November, a glitch caused the spacecraft to send back gibberish data, but on April 20, it got in touch with usable information on its health and status.
NASA’s Voyager account on social media announced the triumph with a simple message: ‘Hi, it’s me.’ The space agency also shared a photo of the Voyager flight team celebrating the reception of the data.
The Voyager 1 team had to play a long-distance game of detective with the elderly probe, which has weathered the demanding space environment for decades. They traced the problem to a single chip in the flight data subsystem, an onboard computer that prepares science and engineering data to be sent home. That chip held some of the FDS software code.
‘The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable,’ NASA said in a statement. ‘Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory.’
The FDS fix is complex and involves dividing and storing the code in different places. The team started with the code that lets Voyager 1 package up its engineering data, and it worked. ‘During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software,’ NASA said. ‘These include the portions that will start returning science data.’
The spacecraft and its twin Voyager 2 launched in 1977 with the goal of studying our solar system. Voyager 1 visited Jupiter and Saturn and then kept on going and going. In 2012, it left our cosmic neighborhood and entered the space between stars. It was the first human-made object to leave our solar system. Voyager 2 later followed its sibling into interstellar space in 2018.
Voyager 1’s distance and age make it challenging to troubleshoot. It takes about 22.5 hours for a signal to cover the 15 billion miles between Earth and the probe, and just as long to receive a response back. Voyager 1’s initial mission was set to last for just four years.
‘Finding solutions to challenges the probes encounter often entails consulting original, decades-old documents written by engineers who didn’t anticipate the issues that are arising today,’ NASA said. ‘The two Voyager spacecraft could remain in the range of the Deep Space Network through about 2036, depending on how much power the spacecraft still have to transmit a signal back to Earth.
