Earth’s most distant spacecraft, Voyager 1, has begun communicating properly with Nasa after engineers worked for months to fix the 46-year-old probe remotely.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which manufactures and operates the agency’s robotic spacecraft, said in December that the probe – more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away – is sending gibberish code back to Earth.
In an update released on Monday, JPL announced that the mission team managed to receive “after some ingenious detective work” useful data about the health and status of Voyager 1’s engineering systems. “The next step is to enable the spacecraft to return science data again,” JPL said. Despite the error, Voyager 1 operated normally throughout, it added.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was designed with the primary goal of conducting close-up studies of Jupiter and Saturn in a five-year mission. However, its journey continued and the spacecraft is now approaching half a century in operation.
Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in August 2012, making it the first man-made object to venture out of the solar system. It is currently traveling at 37,800 mph (60,821 km/h).
The recent problem was related to one of the spacecraft’s three on-board computers, which are responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before sending it to Earth. Unable to repair a broken chip, the JPL team decided to move the corrupted code elsewhere, a difficult task considering the old technology.
The computers on Voyager 1 and its sister probe, Voyager 2, have less than 70 kilobytes of memory in total – the equivalent of a low-resolution computer image. They use old fashioned digital tape to record data.
The fix was sent from Earth on April 18, but it took two days to determine if it was successful, as a radio signal takes about 22 and a half hours to reach Voyager 1 and another 22 and a half hours for a reaction to come back to Earth. “When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification had worked,” JPL said.
made Voyager 1 and 2 numerous scientific discoveries, including taking detailed surveys of Saturn and revealing that Jupiter also has rings, as well as active volcanism on one of its moons, Io. The probes later discovered 23 new moons around the outer planets.
Because their orbit takes them so far from the sun, the Voyager probes are unable to use solar panels, instead converting the heat produced from the natural radioactive decay of plutonium into electricity to power the spacecraft’s systems drive.
In about 40,000 years, the probes will pass relatively close, in astronomical terms, to two stars. Voyager 1 will come within 1.7 light years of a star in the constellation Ursa Minor, while Voyager 2 will come within a similar distance of a star called Ross 248 in the constellation Andromeda.
