NASA Restablishes Contact with Voyager 1

The National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) has resumed contact with Earth’s most distant spacecraft, Voyager 1, for the first time in five months.

Voyager 1 began its journey 46 years ago, on 5 September 1977. It was launched with its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2, to embark on a grand tour of the solar system. Having flown past Saturn, Jupiter, Uranus and Neptune, both probes are now the only man-made craft to ever fly in interstellar space.

Despite travelling 24 billion kilometres from Earth, Voyager 1 has still been transmitting data home, albeit with a delay time of 22-and-a-half hours.

However, according to NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), the team stopped receiving usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems on 14 November last year.

In a statement released via JPL’s official website on Monday, 22 April, NASA explained exactly what went wrong: “The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the flight data subsystem (FDS) memory – including some of the FDS computer’s software code – isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable.”

With some clever fine-tuning, the members of the Voyager flight team were able to split the vital code into sections and move it elsewhere on the FDS.

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