Lost and Found: Voyager1 is Back Online

Scientist have managed to make contact with NASA’s interstellar explorer Voyager 1, in an understandable way, again. On April 20, Voyager 1 informed ground control about its health status for the first time in 5 months. The spacecraft is still unable to send valid scientific data back to Earth, but can update us about the health and operational status of its engineering systems.

The binary code of Voyager 1, the first man-made object to leave the Solar System and enter interstellar space, stopped making sense on November 14, 2023. This was the language (made up of 0s and 1s) the spacecraft was using to communicate with the flight team at NASA.

In March, the operating team of Voyager 1 sent a digital “nudge” to the spacecraft, which prompted the flight data subsystem (FDS) to send home a full memory readout. This memory dump revealed that the problem was the result of a corrupted code on a single chip representing about 3% of the FDS memory. The loss of this code resulted in Voyager 1’s science and engineering data becoming unusable.

Naturally, the NASA team cannot physically repair or replace this chip. They may, however, remotely place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. While no single section of the memory is big enough to store all of this code, the team can break it up and store it as separate chunks.

On April 18, 2024, the team started sending the code to its new location in the FDS memory – a laborious process as it takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to travel the distance between Earth and Voyager 1.

However, on April 20, the team confirmed that the modifications have worked. For the first time in five months, scientists could communicate with Voyager 1 and check its “health”. In the coming days, the team will work on tuning the rest of the FDS software and will aim to recover the regions of the system responsible for packaging and returning vital scientific data from beyond the Solar System.

Voyager 1 has been in space for 47 years, and is now 24 billion kilometres from Earth, traveling at 62,100 kilometres per hour.

Receiving a signal from Voyager again 1 is an important milestone in space exploration. It shows that we can continue to learn more about the vastness and mysteries of the universe.