After months of spewing gibberish, NASA’s Voyager 1 probe, the most distant man-made object in the universe, is now providing ground control with useful information, the US space agency announced on Monday.
On November 14, 2023, the spaceship ceased transmitting legible data to Earth, although controllers could see it was still taking commands.
Teams at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory identified a single malfunctioning chip as the cause in March and came up with a creative coding solution that operated within the limited memory of the system, which is 46 years old.
“Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems,” the agency said.
“The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again.”
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was mankind’s first spacecraft to enter the interstellar medium, in 2012, and is currently more than 15 billion miles from Earth. Messages sent from Earth take about 22.5 hours to reach the spacecraft.
Its twin, Voyager 2, also left the solar system in 2018.
Both Voyager spacecraft carry “Golden Records” — 12-inch, gold-plated copper disks intended to convey the story of our world to extraterrestrials.
Symbolic instructions explaining how to play the record are included, along with a map of our solar system and a piece of uranium that acts as a radioactive clock to allow recipients to date the spaceship’s launch.
Selected for NASA by a committee led by the renowned astronomer Carl Sagan, the record contains sounds and music that can be played with the included stylus in addition to encoded pictures of Earthly life.
It is anticipated that their power banks will run out after 2025. After that, they might roam the Milky Way silently for all of eternity.
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