NASA has successfully restored clear communication with Voyager 1, the most distant human-made object in space, after months of receiving unintelligible data.
Since November, flight controllers had been grappling with garbled information from Voyager 1. The spacecraft, launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, had stopped sending back understandable engineering data, leaving engineers puzzled. After meticulous troubleshooting, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California traced the issue to a faulty computer chip.
“It was like making a phone call where you can’t hear the person on the other end,” a JPL spokeswoman explained. The team ingeniously rearranged the spacecraft’s coding to bypass the malfunctioning chip, and late last week, they received the first clear engineering updates in months. While science data transmission is still being restored, the successful workaround marks a significant milestone in maintaining communication with the venerable spacecraft.
Voyager 1 is currently over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away from Earth, traveling through interstellar space—the region between star systems—since crossing the heliopause in 2012. Communicating with the spacecraft is no small feat; signals take more than 22 hours to reach it, resulting in a round-trip communication delay of nearly two days.
Its twin, Voyager 2, meanwhile, is 12.6 billion miles away and continues to operate without issues. Both spacecraft have provided invaluable data about our solar system and beyond, contributing to our understanding of the cosmos.
The Voyager missions have long surpassed their original objectives, and their ongoing journeys continue to inspire scientists and enthusiasts around the globe. The recent success in troubleshooting Voyager 1’s communication problem is a testament to the dedication and ingenuity of NASA’s engineers, ensuring that even after 45 years, the spacecraft can continue its mission to the stars.
Reference(s):
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