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30 years ago: voyager 2’s historic neptune flyby.

Anthony Greicius

Getting there, being there.

Thirty years ago, on Aug. 25, 1989, NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft made a close flyby of Neptune, giving humanity its first close-up of our solar system’s eighth planet. Marking the end of the Voyager mission’s Grand Tour of the solar system’s four giant planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — that first was also a last: No other spacecraft has visited Neptune since.

“The Voyager planetary program really was an opportunity to show the public what science is all about,” said Ed Stone, a professor of physics at Caltech and Voyager’s project scientist since 1975. “Every day we learned something new.”

Wrapped in teal- and cobalt-colored bands of clouds, the planet that Voyager 2 revealed looked like a blue-hued sibling to Jupiter and Saturn, the blue indicating the presence of methane. A massive, slate-colored storm was dubbed the “Great Dark Spot,” similar to Jupiter’s Great Red Spot. Six new moons and four rings were discovered.

During the encounter, the engineering team carefully changed the probe’s direction and speed so that it could do a close flyby of the planet’s largest moon, Triton. The flyby showed evidence of geologically young surfaces and active geysers spewing material skyward. This indicated that Triton was not simply a solid ball of ice, even though it had the lowest surface temperature of any natural body observed by Voyager: minus 391 degrees Fahrenheit (minus 235 degrees Celsius).

The conclusion of the Neptune flyby marked the beginning of the Voyager Interstellar Mission, which continues today, 42 years after launch. Voyager 2 and its twin, Voyager 1 (which had also flown by Jupiter and Saturn), continue to send back dispatches from the outer reaches of our solar system. At the time of the Neptune encounter, Voyager 2 was about 2.9 billion miles (4.7 billion kilometers) from Earth; today it is 11 billion miles (18 billion kilometers) from us. The faster-moving Voyager 1 is 13 billion miles (21 billion kilometers) from Earth.   

By the time Voyager 2 reached Neptune, the Voyager mission team had completed five planetary encounters. But the big blue planet still posed unique challenges.

About 30 times farther from the Sun than Earth is, the icy giant receives only about 0.001 times the amount of sunlight that Earth does. In such low light, Voyager 2’s camera required longer exposures to get quality images. But because the spacecraft would reach a maximum speed of about 60,000 mph (90,000 kph) relative to Earth, a long exposure time would make the image blurry. (Imagine trying to take a picture of a roadside sign from the window of a speeding car.)

So the team programmed Voyager 2’s thrusters to fire gently during the close approach, rotating the spacecraft to keep the camera focused on its target without interrupting the spacecraft’s overall speed and direction.

The probe’s great distance also meant that by the time radio signals from Voyager 2 reached Earth, they were weaker than those of other flybys. But the spacecraft had the advantage of time: The Voyagers communicate with Earth via the Deep Space Network, or DSN, which utilizes radio antennas at sites in Madrid, Spain; Canberra, Australia; and Goldstone, California. During Voyager 2’s Uranus encounter in 1986, the three largest DSN antennas were 64-meters (210 feet) wide. To assist with the Neptune encounter, the DSN expanded the dishes to 70 meters (230 feet). They also included nearby non-DSN antennas to collect data, including another 64-meter (210 feet) dish in Parkes, Australia, and multiple 25-meter (82 feet) antennas at the Very Large Array in New Mexico.

The effort ensured that engineers could hear Voyager loud and clear. It also increased how much data could be sent back to Earth in a given period, enabling the spacecraft to send back more pictures from the flyby. 

In the week leading up to that August 1989 close encounter, the atmosphere was electric at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, which manages the Voyager mission. As images taken by Voyager 2 during its Neptune approach made the four-hour journey to Earth, Voyager team members would crowd around computer monitors around the Lab to see.

“One of the things that made the Voyager planetary encounters different from missions today is that there was no internet that would have allowed the whole team and the whole world to see the pictures at the same time,” Stone said. “The images were available in real time at a limited number of locations.”

But the team was committed to giving the public updates as quickly as possible, so from Aug. 21 to Aug. 29, they would share their discoveries with the world during daily press conferences. On Aug. 24, a program called “Voyager All Night” broadcast regular updates from the probe’s closest encounter with the planet, which took place at 4 a.m. GMT (9 p.m. in California on Aug. 24).

The next morning, Vice President Dan Quayle visited the Lab to commend the Voyager team. That night, Chuck Berry, whose song “Johnny B. Goode” was included on the Golden Record that flew with both Voyagers, played at JPL’s celebration of the feat.

Of course, the Voyagers’ achievements extend far beyond that historic week three decades ago. Both probes have now entered interstellar space after exiting the heliosphere — the protective bubble around the planets created by a high-speed flow of particles and magnetic fields spewed outward by our Sun.

They are reporting back to Earth on the “weather” and conditions from this region filled with the debris from stars that exploded elsewhere in our galaxy. They have taken humanity’s first tenuous step into the cosmic ocean where no other operating probes have flown.

Voyager data also complement other missions, including NASA’s Interstellar Boundary Explorer ( IBEX ), which is remotely sensing that boundary where particles from our Sun collide with material from the rest of the galaxy. And NASA is preparing the Interstellar Mapping and Acceleration Probe ( IMAP ), due to launch in 2024, to capitalize on Voyager observations.

The Voyagers send their findings back to DSN antennas with 13-watt transmitters — about enough power to run a refrigerator light bulb.

“Every day they travel somewhere that human probes have never been before,” said Stone. “Forty-two years after launch, and they’re still exploring.”

For more information about the Voyager mission visit:

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/

For more images of Neptune taken by Voyager 2 visit:

https://voyager.jpl.nasa.gov/galleries/images-voyager-took/neptune/

Calla Cofield Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif. 626-808-2469 [email protected]

NASA's Voyager probes have been traveling through space for nearly 46 years. Here are 18 groundbreaking photos from their incredible mission.

• Nearly 46 years after their launch, Voyager 1 and 2 will likely soon reach the end of their scientific mission . 
• NASA recently lost contact with Voyager 2 after sending it a bad command by mistake. 
• Here are 18 pictures the probes took over the course of their forty-plus-year journey. 

The Voyager probes are pioneers of science, making it farther into space than any other manufactured object. But now, they face a terminal problem: their power is running out.

The twin probes were originally sent on a four-year mission to tour the solar system, but they exceeded all expectations and are still going nearly 46 years later. That makes them NASA's longest-lived mission.

Scientists are now doing their best to  keep the probes going for as long as possible. They recently found a clever hack to extend Voyager 2's life for another three years and plan to do the same with Voyager 1.

But these are old machines and NASA is constantly scrambling to fix mistakes. Last year, Voyager 1 started sending garbled data from the outside of the solar system. NASA ultimately figured out one of its computers had gone dead.

Voyager 2 is now in limbo , as the agency revealed Friday it had lost contact with the probe when someone sent a wrong command. It could be the end of Voyager 2's mission if NASA can't fix the mistake, which the agency probably won't be able to do before October.

As the probes are nearing the end of their scientific mission, here are 18 images from Voyager that changed science.

The Voyager probes were designed to visit Jupiter and Saturn.

The Voyager mission included two probes — Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 — which NASA launched in 1977 within a few months of each other.

NASA took advantage of a rare planet alignment to turbocharge their journeys into space.

NASA originally built the probes to last five years, but they have exceeded that lifespan many times .

As of August 20 and September 5, 2023, Voyager 2 and Voyager 1 will have been traveling for 46 years, respectively. 

This is what Voyager 1 saw on its approach to Jupiter.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 reached Jupiter in 1979.

As they flew by the planet, they took about 50,000 pictures of Jupiter. These blew away scientists, as the quality of the pictures was much better than those taken from Earth, according to NASA.

These snaps  taught scientists important facts about the planet's atmosphere, magnetic forces, and geology that would have been difficult to decipher otherwise.

The probes discovered two new moons orbiting Jupiter: Thebe and Metis.

They also spotted a thin ring around Jupiter.

The probe captured this picture as it was looking back at the planet backlit by the Sun. 

Voyager 1 discovered volcanoes at the surface of Io, one of Jupiter's moons.

Next stop: Saturn.

In 1980 and 1981, the probes reached Saturn . The flyby gave scientists unprecedented insight into the planet's ring structure, atmosphere, and moons.

Voyager snapped Saturn's rings in more detail than ever before.

And showed every secret that Enceladus, Saturn's moon, had to offer.

Saturn, snapped as the probe flew away, was shown in a new light.

By 1986, Voyager 2 had made it to Uranus.

By 1986, Voyager 1 has finished its grand tour of the solar system, and few out towards space. But Voyager 2 kept on its exploring our nearest planets, passing 50,600 miles away from Uranus in January 1986. 

Voyager 2 discovered two extra rings around Uranus , revealing the planet had at least 11, not 9. 

Voyager 2 also spotted 11 previously unseen moons around Uranus.

Here is a picture of Miranda, Uranus's sixth-biggest moon.

Voyager 2 was the first spacecraft to observe Neptune from a close distance.

In 1989, 12 years after its launch, Voyager 2 passed within 3,000 miles of Neptune. 

Here's Nepture taken by Voyager 2, in all its blue glory.

Voyager 2 took this unflattering pic of Triton's rough face.

It captured Triton, Neptune's moon in unprecedented detail. 

And snapped Triton's southern hemisphere.

As it flew by, Voyager 2 uncovered Neptune's rings.

As its parting gift, Voyager 2 took this beautiful picture of light grazing Neptune's south pole.

This is Voyager 2's last picture. Since it wouldn't come across another planet on its ongoing journey, NASA switched off its cameras after its flyby of Neptune to conserve energy for other instruments. 

Voyager 1 had one last trick up its sleeve.

As its last photographic hurrah in 1990, Voyager 1 took 60 images of the solar system from 4 billion miles away.

It gave us the Earth's longest selfie, dubbed the "pale blue dot."

This remains the longest-range selfie: a portrait of the Earth taken by a human-made probe from 4 billion miles away. 

After this picture, NASA switched off Voyager 1's cameras to save energy. NASA could switch the probes' cameras back on , but it is not a priority for the mission. 

Beyond the solar system

Though the probes are no longer sending pictures, they haven't stopped sending crucial information about space. 

In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first human-made instrument to cross into interstellar space by crossing the boundary between our solar system and the rest of the universe, called the heliopause. 

Voyager 2 was second, crossing that threshold in 2018 . The probe revealed that there was yet another  layer outside of our heliosphere.

The probes keep sending back measurements from interstellar space, like weird hums likely coming from vibrations made by neighboring stars.

Even after their instruments are switched off, the probes' mission continues.

NASA is planning to switch more of the probes' instruments in the hope of extending their life to the 2030s.

But even after all their instruments become quiet, their mission will carry on. As they drift off, they will still be carrying a golden record that carries crucial information about humanity. If intelligent extraterrestrial life exists, they could use that information to reach out to us.

This article was originally published on June 6, 2022, and is being updated with the latest developments about Voyager 1 and 2. 

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Voyager 2's Last Image of Uranus

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Saturn Taken from Voyager 2

This true color picture was assembled from Voyager 2 Saturn images obtained Aug. 4 from a distance of 21 million kilometers (13 million miles) on the spacecraft's approach trajectory. Three of Saturn's icy moons are evident at left. They are, in order of distance from the planet: Tethys, 1,050 km. (652 mi.) in diameter; Dione, 1,120 km. (696 mi.); and Rhea, 1,530 km. (951 mi.). The shadow of Tethys appears on Saturn's southern hemisphere. A fourth satellite, Mimas, is less evident, appearing as a bright spot a quarter-inch in from the planet's limb about half an inch above Tethys; the shadow of Mimas appears on the planet about three-quarters of an inch directly above that of Tethys. The pastel and yellow hues on the planet reveal many contrasting bright and darker bands in both hemispheres of Saturn's weather system. The Voyager project is managed for NASA by the Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

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Voyager spacecraft gave us a scare. But NASA's bringing it back to life.

Our farthest-away spacecraft isn't finished yet.

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft , at over 15 billion miles away and hurtling ever-deeper into the cosmos, beamed back crucial data about its health for the first time in five months. NASA released a photo of mission engineers celebrating the success of their software patch with raised arms and wide grins.

"After some inventive sleuthing, the mission team can — for the first time in five months — check the health and status of the most distant human-made object in existence," the space agency said in an online post.

The pioneering and beloved Voyager 1, however, isn't completely out of the woods. "The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again," NASA explained. Before the mishap, which began in November 2023, Voyager 1 was returning unprecedented data about the radiation in interstellar space and how far the sun's protective bubble of energy and particles extends into the cosmos. (Its sister craft, Voyager 2, at over 12 billion miles, continues to send back this information.)

"The science data that the Voyagers are returning gets more valuable the farther away from the Sun they go, so we are definitely interested in keeping as many science instruments operating as long as possible," Linda Spilker, Voyager’s project scientist, said last year.

Though NASA has repeatedly fixed software glitches on the aging Voyager craft , each over a half-century-old now, the situation was prolonged enough to grow worrisome. Early this month, the space agency noted "corrupted memory" had indeed caused the interstellar probe to send back indecipherable information. One of the onboard computers, the flight data subsystem (FDS), had a single chip that no longer worked.

What's more, engineers couldn't just pop the hood. "Space is hard. Interstellar space is harder," NASA posted on X (formerly Twitter), in February. "Solving issues like this takes time – because it takes more than 22 hours for a message to travel from Earth to my twin Voyager 1 and another 22 hours for a response to make it back."

"Space is hard. Interstellar space is harder."

As the corrupted chip couldn't be replaced, NASA engineers sent a deep space signal to Voyager to store the chip's unique code in other chips, as "no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety." It worked.

What's next? Voyager engineers will similarly now move and test code responsible for the mission's science data.

Beyond inevitable software mishaps on old hardware (hardware that's also exposed to the hostile particles zipping through interstellar space , known galactic cosmic rays), the probes' greatest limiting factor is nuclear fuel. Supplies are running low; in the next few years, some scientific instruments will likely need to be powered down. It's possible that NASA can keep the Voyager craft communicating through the mid-2030s.

Yet even when communication ceases, the mission will carry on. Voyager craft carry "a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials," the space agency explained. "The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth."

If anyone beyond Earth ever gets to listen, they'll be lucky: The records contain tunes from Chuck Berry.

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galleries  /  images voyager took

Images voyager took of uranus.

NASA's Voyager 2 spacecraft flew closely past distant Uranus, the seventh planet from the Sun, in January. At its closet, the spacecraft came within 81,800 kilometers (50,600 miles) of Uranus's cloudtops on Jan. 24, 1986. Voyager 2 radioed thousands of images and voluminous amounts of other scientific data on the planet, its moons, rings, atmosphere, interior and the magnetic environment surrounding Uranus.

For a fact sheet on the Uranus science summary, click here .

False-color view of Uranus.

Uranus’s outermost ring., uranus’s moon miranda., true-color (left) and false-color views of uranus. january 17, 1986. range 5.7 million miles..

False-color composite of Uranus shows discrete cloud. January 14, 1986. Range, 8.0 million miles.

Time-lapse images show cloud movements in Uranus’s atmosphere over 4.6-hour interval.

Farewell shot of crescent Uranus as Voyager 2 departs. January 25, 1986. Range 600,000 miles.

Three of the moons discovered by Voyager 2: 1986U1, 1986U3, and 1986U4. January 18, 1986. Range 4.8 million miles.

Two "shepherd" moons, 1986U7 and 1986U8, with epsilon ring. January 21, 1986. Range, 2.5 million miles.

False-color composite of Uranus’s rings (from top): epsilon, delta, gamma, eta, beta, alpha, 4, 5 and 6. January 21 1986. Range, 2.6 million miles.

Rings of Uranus, including newly discovered 10th ring designated 1986U1R (barely visible below outermost epsilon ring). January 23, 1986. Range, 690,000 miles.

Backlit view shows continuous distribution of fine particles throughout ring system. January 24, 1986. Range, 147,000 miles.

Heavy crate ring seen in most detailed view of Umbriel. January 24, 1986. Range, 346,000 miles.

Best image of Oberon shows cratering and large peak on moon’s lower limb. January 24, 1986. Range 410,000 miles.

Mosaic of Ariel, most detailed view from Voyager 2 shows numerous faults and valleys. January 24, 1986. Range, 80,000 miles.

Highest-resolution picture of Titania displays prominent fault valleys nearly 1,000 miles long. January 24, 1986. Range, 229,000 miles.

Color composite shows evidence of impact scars and past geologic activity on Titania. January 24, 1986. Range, 300,000 miles.

Computer mosaic of Miranda images shows varied geologic regions at high resolution. January 24, 1986.

Unusual "Chevron" figure seen on approach to Miranda. January 24, 1986. Range, 26,000 miles.

Varied terrain on Miranda indicates complex geologic history. January 24, 1986. Range, 21,000 miles.

Voyager 2 image of Miranda taken shortly before closest approach. January 24, 1986. Range 19,000 miles.

Miranda displays rugged, high-elevation terrain (right), lower, grooved terrain and large crater (lower left) 15 miles across. January 24, 1986. Range, 22,000 miles.

After months of sending gibberish to NASA, Voyager 1 is finally making sense again

NASA's Voyager 1 probe has resumed sending usable data back to Earth after engineers fixed a computer error that caused the interstellar spacecraft to only transmit gibberish for five months.

NASA's Voyager 1 probe is once again sending readable radio signals back to Earth after engineers fixed a computer glitch that caused the spacecraft to malfunction in November .

For the first time in five months, Voyager 1 is now transmitting usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems back to our planet, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced Monday (April 22). However, engineers have yet to fix the software that enables the spacecraft to return science data.

Voyager 1 is cruising through interstellar space roughly 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away from Earth, which means mission control teams have to wait 22.5 hours for their commands to reach the spacecraft and another 22.5 hours for a response. Voyager 1 and its twin probe — Voyager 2, which continues to operate normally after a 2-week blackout last year — were launched almost 47 years ago and are the most distant human-made objects in existence. 

Engineers first noticed something wrong with Voyager 1 on Nov. 14, 2023, when the probe suddenly began transmitting a nonsensical stream of ones and zeros instead of its usual neatly packaged science and engineering datasets. 

Mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands, however, indicating that its vital systems were operating normally.

Related: A mysterious 'hum' vibrates interstellar space. Voyager 1 has a recording of it.

In early March, after three months of unsuccessful tinkering , NASA engineering teams determined the issue was tied to one of Voyager 1's three onboard computer systems known as the "flight data subsystem" (FDS). The FDS is essential for packaging data harvested by the probe before they are sent to Earth, according to NASA's announcement.

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Engineers located the glitch by sending a command — or "poke" — that prompted the FDS to try new sequences of code in its software in case the issue could be resolved by skirting a corrupted section. The command triggered a signal that differed from the stream of gibberish the spacecraft had been sending back, and that engineers were able to decode . 

It turned out a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory, including some of its computer software code, had stopped working. The loss of that code meant the probe's science and engineering data were unusable, according to NASA. To get around the issue, engineers broke up the code once stored in the chip and squeezed sections of it into functioning portions of the FDS memory. 

— Historic space photo of the week: Voyager 2 spies a storm on Saturn 42 years ago

— Neptune isn't as blue as you think, and these new images of the planet prove it

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The team then rewrote some of the reshuffled code so it could work as a whole again.

Engineers saved these modifications to the FDS memory on April 18. Two days later, they received a response from Voyager 1 showing that the reshuffle worked. For the first time in five months, the probe's message contained readable data, prompting celebrations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

However, solving the spacecraft's science data transmission will take further mending of the corrupted portions of the FDS software, NASA said in its announcement.

Sascha is a U.K.-based trainee staff writer at Live Science. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Southampton in England and a master’s degree in science communication from Imperial College London. Her work has appeared in The Guardian and the health website Zoe. Besides writing, she enjoys playing tennis, bread-making and browsing second-hand shops for hidden gems.

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admin said: NASA engineers have fixed a computer error that caused the interstellar Voyager 1 probe to glitch and stop transmitting data back to Earth for five months. After months of sending gibberish to NASA, Voyager 1 is finally making sense again : Read more

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Iowa scientist thrilled NASA regains link with distant Voyager spacecraft

by Matt Kelley | Apr 25, 2024

A research scientist in the Physics and Astronomy Department at the University of Iowa is delighted NASA engineers were able to reestablish communication with the Voyager 1 spacecraft, which has flown further into space than any human-made object.

Dr. Bill Kurth says Voyager, which he started working on at the UI five decades ago, is now 15-billion miles from Earth. “That’s 165 times farther from the sun than we are,” Kurth says. “It’s 22-and-a-half hours ‘light time’ from Earth. That means if we send a signal to Voyager, it takes almost a day to get to Voyager and if Voyager responds, it takes almost another day for it to come back.”

Bill Kurth (UI photo)

Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched in 1977 and are now well beyond the edge of our solar system. This past November, Voyager One went silent after a memory chip in one of its three onboard computers failed. A few days ago, the team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory was able to restore the spacecraft and regain the ability to receive and transmit messages over the incredibly great distance.

“The team at JPL has worked miracles over the decades,” Kurth says. “They’ve basically pulled both of these spacecraft out of the fire a number of times and I was not terribly surprised that they could do it again.”

Despite its aging electronics, Kurth says Voyager is still sending back information that’s vitally important to researchers who are trying to understand the fabric of our universe.

“We’re now in a region of space that no instrument or spacecraft from Earth has ever been. It’s in what we call the ‘interstellar medium.’ That’s the stuff between the stars,” Kurth says. “We’re outside of the extended sun’s atmosphere for the first time and we’re making measurements of that medium.”

Kurth started working on Voyager as a UI graduate student in 1974. He’s now the principal investigator for the plasma wave science instrument on the spacecraft, which was designed and built at Iowa. When the Voyagers were launched, they were designed to visit the planets Jupiter and Saturn, and perhaps be able to go on to Uranus and Neptune.

“After the Neptune flyby, the spacecraft were in good health and NASA decided to rename the mission the Voyager Interstellar Mission with the hopes that someday, it would get into the interstellar medium. And it has,” Kurth says. “It took a long cruise to get there and I’m just very happy to have been part of that.”

Much like the Mars rovers that far exceeded their original lifespans, Voyager One is expected to continue soaring into deep space, and NASA says its generators may continue to have power to run its instruments through 2036.

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Voyager 1 transmitting data again after Nasa remotely fixes 46-year-old probe

Engineers spent months working to repair link with Earth’s most distant spacecraft, says space agency

Earth’s most distant spacecraft, Voyager 1, has started communicating properly again with Nasa after engineers worked for months to remotely fix the 46-year-old probe.

Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which makes and operates the agency’s robotic spacecraft, said in December that the probe – more than 15bn miles (24bn kilometres) away – was sending gibberish code back to Earth.

In an update released on Monday , JPL announced the mission team had managed “after some inventive sleuthing” to receive usable data about the health and status of Voyager 1’s engineering systems. “The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again,” JPL said. Despite the fault, Voyager 1 had operated normally throughout, it added.

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was designed with the primary goal of conducting close-up studies of Jupiter and Saturn in a five-year mission. However, its journey continued and the spacecraft is now approaching a half-century in operation.

Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in August 2012, making it the first human-made object to venture out of the solar system. It is currently travelling at 37,800mph (60,821km/h).

Hi, it's me. - V1 https://t.co/jgGFBfxIOe — NASA Voyager (@NASAVoyager) April 22, 2024

The recent problem was related to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, which are responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it is sent to Earth. Unable to repair a broken chip, the JPL team decided to move the corrupted code elsewhere, a tricky job considering the old technology.

The computers on Voyager 1 and its sister probe, Voyager 2, have less than 70 kilobytes of memory in total – the equivalent of a low-resolution computer image. They use old-fashioned digital tape to record data.

The fix was transmitted from Earth on 18 April but it took two days to assess if it had been successful as a radio signal takes about 22 and a half hours to reach Voyager 1 and another 22 and a half hours for a response to come back to Earth. “When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on 20 April, they saw that the modification worked,” JPL said.

Alongside its announcement, JPL posted a photo of members of the Voyager flight team cheering and clapping in a conference room after receiving usable data again, with laptops, notebooks and doughnuts on the table in front of them.

The Retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who flew two space shuttle missions and acted as commander of the International Space Station, compared the JPL mission to long-distance maintenance on a vintage car.

“Imagine a computer chip fails in your 1977 vehicle. Now imagine it’s in interstellar space, 15bn miles away,” Hadfield wrote on X . “Nasa’s Voyager probe just got fixed by this team of brilliant software mechanics.

Voyager 1 and 2 have made numerous scientific discoveries , including taking detailed recordings of Saturn and revealing that Jupiter also has rings, as well as active volcanism on one of its moons, Io. The probes later discovered 23 new moons around the outer planets.

As their trajectory takes them so far from the sun, the Voyager probes are unable to use solar panels, instead converting the heat produced from the natural radioactive decay of plutonium into electricity to power the spacecraft’s systems.

Nasa hopes to continue to collect data from the two Voyager spacecraft for several more years but engineers expect the probes will be too far out of range to communicate in about a decade, depending on how much power they can generate. Voyager 2 is slightly behind its twin and is moving slightly slower.

In roughly 40,000 years, the probes will pass relatively close, in astronomical terms, to two stars. Voyager 1 will come within 1.7 light years of a star in the constellation Ursa Minor, while Voyager 2 will come within a similar distance of a star called Ross 248 in the constellation of Andromeda.

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Nasa celebrates as 1977’s voyager 1 phones home at last.

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NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is depicted in this artist’s concept traveling through interstellar ... [+] space, or the space between stars, which it entered in 2012.

Voyager 1 has finally returned usable data to NASA from outside the solar system after five months offline.

Launched in 1977 and now in its 46th year, the probe has been suffering from communication issues since November 14. The same thing also happened in 2022 . However, this week, NASA said that engineers were finally able to get usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems.

Fixing Voyager 1 has been slow work. It’s currently over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, which means a radio message takes about 22.5 hours to reach it—and the same again to receive an answer.

The problem appears to have been its flight data subsystem, one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers. Its job is to package the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth. Since the computer chip that stores its memory and some of its code is broken, engineers had to reinsert that code into a new location.

Next up for engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California is to adjust other parts of the FDS software so Voyager 1 can resume sending science data.

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‘baby reindeer’ star says real martha searches need to stop, patriots select north carolina quarterback drake maye with no 3 pick in nfl draft, beyond the ‘heliopause’.

The longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history, Voyager 1, was launched on September 5, 1977, while its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, was launched a little earlier, on August 20, 1977. Voyager 2—now 12 billion miles away and traveling more slowly—continues to operate normally.

Both are now beyond what astronomers call the heliopause—a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the sun, which is thought to represent the sun’s farthest influence. Voyager 1 got to the heliopause in 2012 and Voyager 2 in 2018.

The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken Feb. 14, 1990, by NASA’s Voyager 1 at a distance of ... [+] 3.7 billion miles (6 billion kilometers) from the sun. The image inspired the title of scientist Carl Sagan's book, "Pale Blue Dot: A Vision of the Human Future in Space," in which he wrote: "Look again at that dot. That's here. That's home. That's us."

Pale Blue Dot

Since their launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard Titan-Centaur rockets, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have had glittering careers. Both photographed Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980 before going their separate ways. Voyager 1 could have visited Pluto, but that was sacrificed so scientists could get images of Saturn’s moon, Titan, a maneuver that made it impossible for it to reach any other body in the solar system. Meanwhile, Voyager 2 took slingshots around the planets to also image Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989—the only spacecraft ever to image the two outer planets.

On February 14, 1990, when 3.7 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back toward the sun and took an image that included our planet as “a mote of dust suspended in a sunbeam.” Known as the “Pale Blue Dot,” it’s one of the most famous photos ever taken. It was remastered in 2019 .

Wishing you clear skies and wide eyes.

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News | Reunited and it feels so good: Voyager 1 is…

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News | Reunited and it feels so good: Voyager 1 is talking sense again

Rocket science? Brain Surgery? A rescue mission?

Reconnecting with NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft was all of that for the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Canada Flintridge, where months of concern and intense troubleshooting turned to smiles and relief this week.

That’s because the Voyager team at the sprawling Southern California lab on April 20 finally heard back from Voyager 1 again, in a way that was more than just gibberish. It wasn’t ET calling home. But it was our own scientific masterpiece calling home, in a way that actually made sense.

For the first time since November, Voyager 1 – the most distant manmade object from Earth at 15 billion miles — was once again returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems.

It means human beings have more precious time to talk to the human-made craft that is our farthest-reaching ambassador and discoverer in interstellar space. Instead of hurtling through space in a lost, lonely existence, it remains what is has always been – a pioneering scientific instrument offering data glimpses at a universe we can only imagine.

For most people it’s hard to imagine anything more difficult: How do you reestablish contact with something that is nearly 50 years old, starting to show its age, and 15 billion miles away.

But the team at JPL found a way. It wasn’t easy though.

After losing contact with the space probe in November, the team back in March received the first signs of Voyager 1 being back online in five months. It took some clever computer engineering and an ongoing emergency operation from 15 million miles away.

“Today was a great day for Voyager 1,” Voyager project scientist Linda Spilker said in a statement to CNN over the weekend. “We’re back in communication with the spacecraft. And we look forward to getting science data back.”

The break in communication came due to malfunction in one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem, which is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth. With the data system unable to function, the space probe was receiving data and sending it back to NASA, but it was essentially unreadable gibberish.

Voyager 1 could hear the messages being sent from Earth but couldn’t respond coherently, providing no information on its health or status.

However, the fact that the ever dependable Voyager, now years past its expected useful life, was still operating gave the team enough hope to attempt what would essentially be brain surgery on the space probe to get it communicating properly again.

Unable to simply repair the part, the team decided to place code elsewhere in the flight data subsystem memory, but since it was too large to put in any single location, they had to break it up in sections — requiring them to adjust the code to ensure it all worked together functionally and update the system.

The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data, which they completed April 18.

It took nearly a day for NASA’s radio signals to reach the probe and another day to hear back while scientists listened intently for a message from deep space, but finally they heard a familiar response.

Now in the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software and begin to once again receive scientific data from Voyager 1.

“We never know for sure what’s going to happen with the Voyagers, but it constantly amazes me when they just keep going,” Voyager Project Manager Suzanne Dodd said in a statement.

“We’ve had many anomalies, and they are getting harder. But we’ve been fortunate so far to recover from them. And the mission keeps going. And younger engineers are coming onto the Voyager team and contributing their knowledge to keep the mission going.”

In case you’re wondering, remember Voyager 1 has family: Voyager 2.

Voyager 2 continues to operate normally, though last year JPL engineers used a longshot maneuver to get it to begin returning data again, too.

Launched more than 46 years ago, the twin Voyager spacecraft are the longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history — or at least our history.

They’ve racked up quite a resume.

Before they ever got to interstellar space – where they are now (a first in its own right) – both probes flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune.

Voyager 1 discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and two new Jovian moons: Thebe and Metis. At Saturn, the craft found five new moons and a new ring called the G-ring.

By February of 1998, it had become the most distant human-made object after overtaking NASA’s Pioneer 10. And by 2012, it entered a whole new ballgame: interstellar space.

Interestingly, according to JPL, Voyager 1 was launched after Voyager 2, but because of a faster route, it exited the asteroid belt earlier than its twin, having overtaken Voyager 2 on Dec. 15, 1977.

Who knows. There’s always the chance – however remote – that it comes across some folks from another world. If it does, they’ll find messages in the Voyagers from Earth, prepared by a group headed by the late scientist Carl Sagan.

There’s a gold-plated copper disc with inscribed symbols to show the location of Earth relative to several pulsars. Audio on the disc includes greetings in 55 languages, 35 sounds from life on Earth – whales signing, human laughter, some Mozart and Bach, and some Chuck Berry.

Bottom line: We’re reunited for now, and it feels so good.

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NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft finally phones home after 5 months of no contact

On Saturday, April 5, Voyager 1 finally "phoned home" and updated its NASA operating team about its health.

NASA's interstellar explorer Voyager 1 is finally communicating with ground control in an understandable way again. On Saturday (April 20), Voyager 1 updated ground control about its health status for the first time in 5 months. While the Voyager 1 spacecraft still isn't sending valid science data back to Earth, it is now returning usable information about the health and operating status of its onboard engineering systems. 

Thirty-five years after its launch in 1977, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space . It was followed out of our cosmic quarters by its space-faring sibling, Voyager 2 , six years later in 2018. Voyager 2, thankfully, is still operational and communicating well with Earth. 

The two spacecraft remain the only human-made objects exploring space beyond the influence of the sun. However, on Nov. 14, 2023, after 11 years of exploring interstellar space and while sitting a staggering 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, Voyager 1's binary code — computer language composed of 0s and 1s that it uses to communicate with its flight team at NASA — stopped making sense.

Related: We finally know why NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft stopped communicating — scientists are working on a fix

In March, NASA's Voyager 1 operating team sent a digital "poke" to the spacecraft, prompting its flight data subsystem (FDS) to send a full memory readout back home.

This memory dump revealed to scientists and engineers that the "glitch" is the result of a corrupted code contained on a single chip representing around 3% of the FDS memory. The loss of this code rendered Voyager 1's science and engineering data unusable.

The NASA team can't physically repair or replace this chip, of course, but what they can do is remotely place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. Though no single section of the memory is large enough to hold this code entirely, the team can slice it into sections and store these chunks separately. To do this, they will also have to adjust the relevant storage sections to ensure the addition of this corrupted code won't cause those areas to stop operating individually, or working together as a whole. In addition to this, NASA staff will also have to ensure any references to the corrupted code's location are updated.

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On April 18, 2024, the team began sending the code to its new location in the FDS memory. This was a painstaking process, as a radio signal takes 22.5 hours to traverse the distance between Earth and Voyager 1, and it then takes another 22.5 hours to get a signal back from the craft. 

By Saturday (April 20), however, the team confirmed their modification had worked. For the first time in five months, the scientists were able to communicate with Voyager 1 and check its health. Over the next few weeks, the team will work on adjusting the rest of the FDS software and aim to recover the regions of the system that are responsible for packaging and returning vital science data from beyond the limits of the solar system.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.’s Open University. Follow him on Twitter @sciencef1rst.

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• Robb62 'V'ger must contact the creator. Reply
• Holy HannaH! Couldn't help but think that "repair" sounded extremely similar to the mechanics of DNA and the evolution of life. Reply
• Torbjorn Larsson *Applause* indeed, thanks to the Voyager teams for the hard work! Reply
• SpaceSpinner I notice that the article says that it has been in space for 35 years. Either I have gone back in time 10 years, or their AI is off by 10 years. V-*ger has been captured! Reply

Admin said: 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 nonsense data. NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft finally phones home after 5 months of no contact : Read more

evw said: I'm incredibly grateful for the persistence and dedication of the Voyagers' teams and for the amazing accomplishments that have kept these two spacecrafts operational so many years beyond their expected lifetimes. V-1 was launched when I was 25 years young; I was nearly delirious with joy. Exploring the physical universe captivated my attention while I was in elementary school and has kept me mesmerized since. I'm very emotional writing this note, thinking about what amounts to a miracle of technology and longevity in my eyes. BRAVO!!! THANK YOU EVERYONE PAST & PRESENT!!!

• EBairead I presume it's Fortran. Well done all. Reply

SpaceSpinner said: I notice that the article says that it has been in space for 35 years. Either I have gone back in time 10 years, or their AI is off by 10 years. V-*ger has been captured!

EBairead said: I presume it's Fortran. Well done all.

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National News | Voyager 1 sending data to Earth for 1st time in…

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National news | voyager 1 sending data to earth for 1st time in 5 months, “today was a great day for voyager 1. we’re back in communication with the spacecraft.".

By Ashley Strickland | CNN

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 humanity’s most distant spacecraft in the cosmos.

Voyager 1 is currently about 15 billion miles away, and at 46 years old, the probe has shown multiple quirks and signs of aging in recent years.

The latest issue experienced by Voyager 1 first cropped up in November 2023, when the flight data system’s telemetry modulation unit began sending an indecipherable repeating pattern of code .

Voyager 1’s flight data system collects information from the spacecraft’s science instruments and bundles it with engineering data that reflects its current health status. Mission control on Earth receives that data in binary code, or a series of ones and zeroes.

But since November, Voyager 1’s flight data system had been stuck in a loop. While the probe has continued to relay a steady radio signal to its mission control team on Earth over the past few months, the signal did not carry any usable data.

The mission team received the first coherent data about the health and status of Voyager 1’s engineering systems on April 20. While the team is still reviewing the information, everything they’ve seen so far suggests Voyager 1 is healthy and operating properly.

“Today was a great day for Voyager 1,” said Linda Spilker, Voyager project scientist at JPL, in a statement Saturday. “We’re back in communication with the spacecraft. And we look forward to getting science data back.”

The breakthrough came as the result of a clever bit of trial and error and the unraveling of a mystery that led the team to a single chip.

Troubleshooting from billions of miles away

After discovering the issue, the mission team attempted sending commands to restart the spacecraft’s computer system and learn more about the underlying cause of the problem.

The team sent a command called a “poke” to Voyager 1 on March 1 to get the flight data system to run different software sequences in the hopes of finding out what was causing the glitch.

On March 3, the team noticed that activity from one part of the flight data system stood out from the rest of the garbled data. While the signal wasn’t in the format the Voyager team is used to seeing when the flight data system is functioning as expected, an engineer with NASA’s Deep Space Network was able to decode it.

The Deep Space Network is a system of radio antennae on Earth that help the agency communicate with the Voyager probes and other spacecraft exploring our solar system.

The decoded signal included a readout of the entire flight data system’s memory.

By investigating the readout, the team determined the cause of the issue: 3% of the flight data system’s memory is corrupted . A single chip responsible for storing part of the system’s memory, including some of the computer’s software code, isn’t working properly. While the cause of the chip’s failure is unknown, it could be worn out or may have been hit by an energetic particle from space, the team said.

The loss of the code on the chip caused Voyager 1’s science and engineering data to be unusable.

Since there was no way to repair the chip, the team opted to store the affected code from the chip elsewhere in the system’s memory. While they couldn’t pinpoint a location large enough to hold all of the code, they were able to divide the code into sections and store it in different spots within the flight data system.

“To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole,” according to an update from NASA . “Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the (flight data system) memory needed to be updated as well.”

After determining the code necessary for packaging Voyager 1’s engineering data, engineers sent a radio signal to the probe commanding the code to a new location in the system’s memory on April 18.

Given Voyager 1’s immense distance from Earth, it takes a radio signal about 22.5 hours to reach the probe, and another 22.5 hours for a response signal from the spacecraft to reach Earth.

On April 20, the team received Voyager 1’s response indicating that the clever code modification had worked, and they could finally receive readable engineering data from the probe once more.

Exploring interstellar space

Within the coming weeks, the team will continue to relocate other affected parts of the system’s software, including those responsible for returning the valuable science data Voyager 1 is collecting.

Initially designed to last five years, the Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, launched in 1977 and are the longest operating spacecraft in history. Their exceptionally long life spans mean that both spacecraft have provided additional insights about our solar system and beyond after achieving their preliminary goals of flying by Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune decades ago.

The probes are currently venturing through uncharted cosmic territory along the outer reaches of the solar system. Both are in interstellar space and are the only spacecraft ever to operate beyond the heliosphere, the sun’s bubble of magnetic fields and particles that extends well beyond the orbit of Pluto.

Voyager 2, which is operating normally, has traveled more than 12.6 billion miles (20.3 billion kilometers) from our planet.

Over time, both spacecraft have encountered unexpected issues and dropouts, including a seven-month period in 2020 when Voyager 2 couldn’t communicate with Earth. In August 2023, the mission team used a long-shot “shout” technique to restore communications with Voyager 2 after a command inadvertently oriented the spacecraft’s antenna in the wrong direction.

The team estimates it’s a few weeks away from receiving science data from Voyager 1 and looks forward to seeing what that data contains.

“We never know for sure what’s going to happen with the Voyagers, but it constantly amazes me when they just keep going,” said Voyager Project Manager Suzanne Dodd, in a statement. “We’ve had many anomalies, and they are getting harder. But we’ve been fortunate so far to recover from them. And the mission keeps going. And younger engineers are coming onto the Voyager team and contributing their knowledge to keep the mission going.”

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After months of silence, Voyager 1 has returned NASA’s calls

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For the last five months, it seemed very possible that a 46-year-old conversation had finally reached its end.

Since its launch from Kennedy Space Center on Sept. 5, 1977, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has diligently sent regular updates to Earth on the health of its systems and data collected from its onboard instruments.

But in November, the craft went quiet.

Voyager 1 is now some 15 billion miles away from Earth. Somewhere in the cold interstellar space between our sun and the closest stars, its flight data system stopped communicating with the part of the probe that allows it to send signals back to Earth. Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge could tell that Voyager 1 was getting its messages, but nothing was coming back.

“We’re to the point where the hardware is starting to age,” said Linda Spilker, the project scientist for the Voyager mission. “It’s like working on an antique car, from 15 billion miles away.”

Week after week, engineers sent troubleshooting commands to the spacecraft, each time patiently waiting the 45 hours it takes to get a response here on Earth — 22.5 hours traveling at the speed of light to reach the probe, and 22.5 hours back.

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By March, the team had figured out that a memory chip that stored some of the flight data system’s software code had failed, turning the craft’s outgoing communications into gibberish.

A long-distance repair wasn’t possible. There wasn’t enough space anywhere in the system to shift the code in its entirety. So after manually reviewing the code line by line, engineers broke it up and tucked the pieces into the available slots of memory.

They sent a command to Voyager on Thursday. In the early morning hours Saturday, the team gathered around a conference table at JPL: laptops open, coffee and boxes of doughnuts in reach.

At 6:41 a.m., data from the craft showed up on their screens. The fix had worked .

“We went from very quiet and just waiting patiently to cheers and high-fives and big smiles and sighs of relief,” Spilker said. “I’m very happy to once again have a meaningful conversation with Voyager 1.”

Voyager 1 is one of two identical space probes. Voyager 2, launched two weeks before Voyager 1, is now about 13 billion miles from Earth, the two crafts’ trajectories having diverged somewhere around Saturn. (Voyager 2 continued its weekly communications uninterrupted during Voyager 1’s outage.)

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They are the farthest-flung human-made objects in the universe, having traveled farther from their home planet than anything else this species has built. The task of keeping communications going grows harder with each passing day. Every 24 hours, Voyager 1 travels 912,000 miles farther away from us. As that distance grows, the signal becomes slower and weaker.

When the probe visited Jupiter in 1979, it was sending back data at a rate of 115.2 kilobits per second, Spilker said. Today, 45 years and more than 14 billion miles later, data come back at a rate of 40 bits per second.

The team is cautiously optimistic that the probes will stay in contact for three more years, long enough to celebrate the mission’s 50th anniversary in 2027, Spilker said. They could conceivably last until the 2030s.

The conversation can’t last forever. Microscopic bits of silica keep clogging up the thrusters that keep the probes’ antennas pointed toward Earth, which could end communications. The power is running low. Eventually, the day will come when both Voyagers stop transmitting data to Earth, and the first part of their mission ends.

But on the day each craft goes quiet, they begin a new era, one that could potentially last far longer. Each probe is equipped with a metallic album cover containing a Golden Record , a gold-plated copper disk inscribed with sounds and images meant to describe the species that built the Voyagers and the planet they came from.

Erosion in space is negligible; the images could be readable for another billion years or more. Should any other intelligent life form encounter one of the Voyager probes and have a means of retrieving the data from the record, they will at the very least have a chance to figure out who sent them — even if our species is by that time long gone.

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Corinne Purtill is a science and medicine reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Her writing on science and human behavior has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Time Magazine, the BBC, Quartz and elsewhere. Before joining The Times, she worked as the senior London correspondent for GlobalPost (now PRI) and as a reporter and assignment editor at the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh. She is a native of Southern California and a graduate of Stanford University.

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Signal from interstellar space: What Voyager 1's latest data tells us

Engineers hear from the longest-operating spacecraft for the first time in five months.

An artist's impression of the Voyager 1 spacecraft entering interstellar space. Photo: Nasa

Scientists are hopeful of collecting fresh data from the Voyager 1 deep space probe after it beamed back its first signals in five months.

The pioneering craft, which launched in 1977, was the first to enter interstellar space , the region beyond the solar system.

But Nasa engineers at mission control in California lost contact with it on November 14 due to a fault with one of its three on-board computers.

The technical issue caused Voyager 1 to send indecipherable messages for months, rendering the engineering and scientific data unusable.

Sounding a little more like yourself, #Voyager1 . For the first time since November, Voyager 1 is returning useable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. Next step: Enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again: https://t.co/eZyqo7uERu pic.twitter.com/6YZM33Mp48 — NASA JPL (@NASAJPL) April 22, 2024

But now, after receiving readable signals from the craft, engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) believe they may be able to recover the data entirely so that scientific operations can resume.

"For the first time since November, Nasa’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its on-board engineering systems," JPL said in a statement.

Voyager 1 has travelled 24 billion km since it was launched, making it and its twin Voyager 2 the two longest-serving spacecraft in history.

What do Voyager 1's latest signals mean?

The problem occurred in the flight data subsystem (FDS), which is responsible for packing the science and engineering data before it is sent back to mission control.

But the chip that stores the memory from the subsystem, including some of its software code, was not working.

Because that code was lost, it caused the spacecraft to send back unreadable data.

Last month, engineers came up with a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store these separately in the FDS.

The plan worked and Voyager 1 sent readable signals for the first time in five months.

Resuming operations

"During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software," JPL said.

"These include the portions that will start returning science data."

Scientists are interested in learning about interstellar space to better understand the universe and possibilities of life beyond Earth.

Nasa has been studying exoplanets – those outside the solar system – for decades, using telescopes.

But no spacecraft has entered interstellar space apart from the Voyager probes.

The spacecraft are providing direct measurements of the mysterious environment, which should help the scientific community study cosmic rays and radiation levels outside the solar system.

Data as such could prove useful when technology is advanced enough to send more spacecraft or even a human mission to interstellar space.

While it was an incredible achievement by the Voyager probes, still no technology can reach our nearest star, Proxima Centauri, which is 4.2 light years away.

With power supplies weakening, it is impossible for Voyager 1 to reach Proxima Centauri, which would take the probe almost 73,000 years.

Nuclear fusion propulsion, a way of powering a spacecraft using high-energy particles created by fusion reactions, could help in making such missions more time-efficient and therefore possible.

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Nasa's Orion spacecraft will carry astronauts to the Moon. It orbited the lunar surface in 2022 as part of an uncrewed test flight. Nasa