NASA has successfully repaired the Voyager 1 probe, which had stopped transmitting readable data in mid-November. The farthest human-made object in space, Voyager 1 is currently more than 15 billion miles from Earth. Teams at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory identified a faulty chip as the cause of the problem and developed an ingenious coding solution to repair it.
The purpose of this repair is to enable the spacecraft to transmit scientific data once again. Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and became the first spacecraft to reach interstellar space in 2012. In 2018, its counterpart Voyager 2 also left our solar system. The probes contain gold-plated copper plates with information about Earth intended for extraterrestrial beings.
The Voyager probes were designed to communicate information about our world to potential extraterrestrial recipients. These included images of life on Earth, music, and sounds that can be played with a needle included in the probe. The power sources of the probes are expected to run out sometime after 2025, after which they will continue to drift silently through the Milky Way.
The content of the discs on the Voyager probes was selected by a committee led by legendary astronomer Carl Sagan. The contents include a map of our solar system and a piece of uranium that acts as a radioactive clock to help determine the date of the probe’s launch. With messages from Earth taking about 22.5 hours to reach the probe, these spacecraft continue to fascinate and intrigue scientists and space enthusiasts around the world.