In the depths of space, the spacecraft Voyager 1 continued sending usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems back to Earth, according to a statement from NASA.
Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object in existence, stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, the statement released on Monday read. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, confirmed the problem was “tied to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem,” NASA said.
This subsystem is critical in packaging the science and engineering data before all the data goes back to Earth, the space agency continued. The team at JPL found that one chip responsible for storing part of the subsystem’s memory did not work, which rendered all of the data unusable and the code was too large to place in one new location.
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The team chose to “divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the” subsystem,” NASA said. On April 18, the team moved the spacecraft’s engineering data to a new location within the subsystem.
“A radio signal takes about 22 and a half hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 and a half hours for a signal to come back to Earth,” NASA said in its statement. “When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.”
In the weeks ahead, the team at JPL will relocate and adjust any other affected parts of the subsystem software, the agency said.
Voyager 1′s twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, continues to function normally, NASA said. Like its twin, Voyager 2 the only other spacecraft to fly into interstellar space. Both were launched in 1977.
Aboard both probes are phonograph records called The Golden Records that each carry time capsules “intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials,” according to NASA. Material placed on the records was chosen for NASA by a committee chaired by Carl Sagan.