NASA’s Voyager 1 probe, the farthest man-made object from Earth, has resumed sending usable information back to ground control after a period of transmitting gibberish. 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 faulty chip that was causing the issue and implemented a coding fix that worked within the spacecraft’s limited memory constraints.
The agency announced that Voyager 1 is now providing data on the health and status of its engineering systems with plans to resume sending scientific data soon. 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 carries a “Golden Record” intended to convey information about Earth to extraterrestrials.
Voyager 1’s twin, Voyager 2 also left the solar system in 2018 with both spacecraft carrying 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