Voyager 1 Restarts Sending Data After 5-Month Silence

After a five-month silence, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, which has been exploring space since 1977, is communicating with Earth again. The spacecraft, now over 15 billion miles from Earth, began sending nonsensical data in November due to a malfunctioning chip in the flight data system (FDS). The FDS is critical for packaging and transmitting both engineering and science data back to Earth.

Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory successfully isolated the problem and developed a solution that involved dividing the affected code into sections and relocating these sections within the FDS memory. The first update, targeting the code responsible for engineering data, was transmitted on April 18, taking approximately 22.5 hours to reach Voyager 1. A signal confirming the success of the update took another 22.5 hours to return to Earth.

Further adjustments to the spacecraft's software are planned in the coming weeks to ensure the continuation of science data transmission. This coding fix is essential for maintaining the long-running mission, as Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to have entered interstellar space, carrying on their Golden Records messages from Earth.