NASA’s Voyager 1 Reconnects with Earth After Five Months of Silence: The Longest-Running Spacecraft in NASA’s History | Science & Technology Update
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, the longest-running mission, is once again sending data back to Earth for the first time since November.
After a five-month silence, scientists have successfully resolved an issue with the probe, which was launched 46 years ago.
On November 14 last year, Voyager 1 stopped transmitting usable data to Earth despite receiving commands and functioning well otherwise.
Voyager 1 was launched alongside its twin, Voyager 2, and it is the only spacecraft to have explored interstellar space, the area between stars.
The Voyager probes have provided groundbreaking information about our galaxy, including revelations about Saturn’s rings, in-depth images of Uranus and Neptune’s rings, and the discovery of Jupiter’s rings.
A picture of Saturn taken by the Voyager spacecrafts in the 1980s. Pic: NASA
Although their cameras are inactive, the Voyagers continue to transmit invaluable data, with Voyager 1 currently over 15 billion miles away from Earth.
NASA engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California remotely diagnosed a problem with Voyager 1’s flight data subsystem, which prevented the transmission of data back to Earth.
The issue was traced to a malfunctioning chip in the flight data subsystem, which caused the data to be unusable. The engineers remotely reconfigured the code on April 18 to address the problem.
A picture of Jupiter taken by the Voyager spacecrafts. Pic: NASA
The team then waited to see if the fix was successful, with a communication delay of around 22-and-a-half hours for signals to reach Voyager 1.
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On April 20, the team received confirmation that their efforts were successful. Voyager 1 was once again in contact, enabling the assessment of the spacecraft’s health and status.
The team will now proceed to adjust the remainder of the computer to resume transmitting additional data.
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Voyager 2 is functioning normally and on course towards a star named Ross 248, with a projected encounter in approximately 40,000 years.
Voyager 1 is expected to reach a star in the Little Dipper constellation in 38,200 years.
