Voyager 1 Is Fully Back Online 6 Months After It Stopped Sending Good Data, NASA Says

NASA announced that Voyager 1 was fully online and in its usual operation.

Voyager 1 Is Fully Online, NASA Says

Voyager 1 ceased providing useful data in November, making it difficult to fix because engineers had to wait 45 hours for a response. The agency got it to send readable data in April and science data from two of its sensors in May.

Voyager 1, which is currently more than 15 billion miles from Earth, is reportedly "conducting normal science operations," according to NASA, which has to resync its timekeeping software and do some maintenance on a digital tape recorder used infrequently.

Following an investigation, the Voyager flight team identified a single chip defect in the flight data subsystem (FDS) as the cause of the issue in November. This one is the spacecraft's component in charge of returning its data to Earth. Some computer code required for transmitting functional data is contained in the broken chip.

NASA claims that the loss of that code rendered data related to science and engineering useless. The team relocated the impacted code to another location in the FDS memory because they could not fix the chip. NASA engineers eventually repaired Voyager 1.

Solving the craft's issues has proven to be an enormous task for scientists and engineers. Now that the craft is so far away, it will take a signal twenty-two and a half hours to cross that great distance. Nevertheless, the group's programming experiment succeeded, and the data became understandable again.

That's not terrible for a probe that has been operating for over 47 years. Voyager 1 was first launched in 1977 on a five-year fly-by mission to explore Jupiter and Saturn. Additionally, NASA continues to find ways to extend the life of the probes, such as using thrusters that haven't been utilized in almost three decades or tapping into reserve power despite the periodic problems with Voyager 1 and Voyager 2.

About Voyager 1

Voyager 1 is the first human-made object to venture into interstellar space. It was launched in 1977 to fly by Jupiter and Saturn. It was the first spacecraft to pass through the heliosphere, where solar radiation from beyond the solar system is absorbed more strongly than from within. It crossed into interstellar space in August 2012 to continue its mission -- collecting data in space. By January 2024, it traveled at roughly 38,000 mph (17.0 kilometers per second) concerning the Sun. It was approximately 136 AU (15 billion miles, or 20 billion kilometers) from Earth, the furthest object ever made by humanity.

Voyager 1 and 2 missions were merged into the Voyager Interstellar Mission (VIM), which got underway on January 1, 1990. The intention was to take NASA's solar system investigation "possibly beyond" the furthest reaches of the Sun's sphere of influence, not just the area around the outer planets.

The specific objectives include data collection on the interstellar medium, the region of space dominated by the solar and magnetic fields of the Sun, and the transition between the heliosphere.

When Voyager 1 "overtook" Pioneer 10 on February 17, 1998, at a distance of 69.4 AU from the Sun, it became the farthest distant artificial object ever created.

Check out more news and information on the Voyager 1 in Science Times.