NASA’s Voyager 1: Back Online After Five Months of Gibberish

NASA’s Voyager 1 probe, the most distant man-made object in the Universe, has started sending usable information back to ground control after a period of sending gibberish, according to the US space agency. The spacecraft had stopped sending readable data to Earth on November 14, 2023, despite receiving commands from controllers. However, in March, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered a malfunctioning chip was causing the issue and implemented a coding fix that worked within the spacecraft’s limited memory constraints.

Voyager 1 is now providing data on the health and status of its engineering systems, with plans to begin sending scientific data once again. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 became the first human-made spacecraft to enter the interstellar medium in 2012, and is currently over 15 billion miles away from Earth. Messages sent from Earth take about 22.5 hours to reach the spacecraft, which is also carrying a “Golden Record” intended to convey information about Earth to extraterrestrials.

Meanwhile, Voyager 2 left the solar system in 2018 and is currently traveling through deep space with its twin brother. Both spacecraft include symbolic instructions, a map of the solar system, and encoded images and sounds of life on Earth on their Golden Records. These records are meant to tell the story of our world and are expected to continue traveling through the Milky Way potentially for eternity. The spacecraft’s power banks are projected to be depleted sometime after 2025.

The discovery that Voyager had stopped sending readable data was made by scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory who were monitoring its signals daily as part of routine maintenance checks. The team quickly realized that there was an error in one of its chips which caused it not to send any meaningful data back to ground control.

To fix this issue, NASA’s engineers implemented a coding fix that worked within the spacecraft’s limited memory constraints. The fix allowed Voyager to resume sending usable information back to ground control.

“We are thrilled that Voyager is now able to send usable information back again,” said Dr. Thomas Zurbuchen