NASA’s Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, is currently transmitting science data once more. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced this week that Voyager 1’s four instruments are functioning following a computer issue in November. The team began receiving meaningful information from Voyager 1 in April and has recently instructed it to resume studying its environment.
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and is now traveling through interstellar space, which is the space between star systems. Prior to arriving in this region, the spacecraft identified a thin ring around Jupiter and observed several of Saturn’s moons. Its instruments are specifically designed to gather data on plasma waves, magnetic fields, and particles. Voyager 1 is situated over 15 billion miles (24.14 billion kilometers) away from Earth, while its twin Voyager 2, which is also in interstellar space, is more than 12 billion miles (19.31 billion kilometers) away.
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