Voyager 1 Restored to Health After Five Months of Silence
NASA Engineers Find a Creative Solution to Communication Problem
The probe has been sending back unreadable data since November 2023.
For the first time in five months, NASA engineers have received decipherable data from Voyager 1 after crafting a creative solution to fix a communication problem aboard the spacecraft.
On Saturday, April 5, Voyager 1 finally phoned home and updated its NASA operating team about its health. The interstellar explorer is back in touch after five months of sending back unreadable data.
NASA says it is once again able to get meaningful information back from the Voyager 1 probe after months of troubleshooting a glitch that had rendered its telemetry data incomprehensible.
The problem was traced to a component of the spacecraft's attitude control system, which helps to keep Voyager 1 pointed in the right direction. When the system malfunctioned, it caused the spacecraft to send back garbled data.
NASA engineers were able to fix the problem by sending a series of commands to Voyager 1 that reconfigured the spacecraft's systems. The fix involved switching to a backup system and then back to the primary system.
With the communication problem resolved, NASA is once again able to get science data back from Voyager 1. The probe is currently about 14 billion miles from Earth and is traveling at a speed of about 38,000 miles per hour. It is the most distant human-made object from Earth.
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