(DailyDig.com) – Voyager 1, NASA’s spacecraft launched in 1977, is now sending data back to Earth again after last November 2023, when an onboard computer problem stopped the transfer of science data, according to scientists in their statement on June 13.
The Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced this week that they have revived and are now operating four of Voyager 1’s instruments. In April, the team received the first coherent data since November, when engineers partially resolved the problem.
This data allowed the engineers to locate the problem in the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS compiles the data before transmitting it to Earth. The team created a workaround that rewrote a piece of code, and the probe began studying the surrounding environment again.
Of the four instruments aboard Voyager 1, two of them began to malfunction again in May, but with some additional engineering, they are all in working order again.
Since Voyager 1 left the Earth’s solar system, it has been traveling between stars in interstellar space. During its journey through our solar system, Voyager 1 discovered Jupiter’s thin ring around it, as well as more moons around Saturn. The instruments aboard Voyager 1 were designed to observe and collect data regarding magnetic fields and particles, along with data on plasma waves.
Engineers have additional work to do in order to fully restore the functionality of the spacecraft. Voyager 1 needs its timekeeping software resynchronized in order for the computers onboard to execute the commands properly. They also need to perform some maintenance on the spacecraft’s digital tape recorder, which stores the data it collects for the instrument studying plasma waves.
Voyager 1 is traveling over 15 billion miles from Earth, the furthest any manmade object has ever traveled. At that distance, commands to the probe take 22.5 hours to reach it, plus another 22.5 hours to return a response.
The twin probe, Voyager 2, sent to study the planets Uranus and Neptune, is also beyond Earth’s solar system over 12 billion miles distant. Both probes have been in space for almost 47 years.
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