NASA’s oldest spacecraft, Voyager 1, is returning data to Earth for the first time since November.
Scientists managed to fix a problem in the probe, which was launched 46 years ago, after five months of silence.
On November 14 of last year, Voyager 1 stopped sending usable data to Earth, even though scientists could say it was still receiving its commands and was otherwise functioning well.
It was first launched alongside its twin, Voyager 2. The pair are the only spacecraft to have ever flown. interstellar spacewhich is the space between the stars.
The Voyager probes send never-before-seen information about our galaxy. Since lifting off in 1977, they have revealed details of Saturn’s rings, provided the first in-depth images of the rings of Uranus and Neptune, and discovered the rings of Jupiter.
Photograph of Saturn taken by the Voyager spacecraft in the 1980s. Photo: NASA
Although their cameras are turned off to conserve power and memory, they continue to send information that would be impossible to obtain anywhere else.
With all this data stored on board and the spacecraft more than 15 billion miles from Earth, NASA scientists necessary to solve the problem remotely.
The team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California confirmed in March that the problem was with one of the three computers aboard Voyager 1. That computer, called the flight data subsystem, is responsible for packaging the data before to send them back to Earth.
Inside the computer, a single chip containing some of the software code had stopped working. Without that code, the data was unusable.
The engineers couldn’t come to fix it. Instead, on April 18, they remotely split the code into different parts of the computer.
A photograph of Jupiter taken by the Voyager spacecraft. Photo: NASA
Then they had to wait to see if their solution had worked.
It takes about 22 and a half hours for a radio signal to reach Voyager 1 and another 22 and a half hours for a response to arrive.
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On April 20, the team received good news. For the first time in five months, they were back in contact with Voyager 1 and were able to check the status and health of the spacecraft.
Now, they’ll adjust the rest of the computer so it can start sending more data.
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Voyager 2 is operating normally and is heading towards a star called Ross 248. It will approach within 1.7 light years of it in about 40,000 years.
Voyager 1 will almost reach a star in the Little Dipper constellation in 38,200 years.