NASA: Voyager 1 once again delivers data from scientific instruments

The American space agency NASA has again managed to receive data from Voyager 1's scientific instruments. This allows the space probe to perform its duties normally again for the first time since 2023.

NASA writes in a blog post However, the work is not yet completely finished. The space organization still has to remedy some of the consequences of the malfunction on board Voyager 1. For example, the software of the spacecraft's three on-board computers must be resynchronized and some maintenance tasks must also be performed.

Voyager 1 stopped on November 14, 2023 sending data to Earth. NASA employees were convinced that the spacecraft was still operational and discovered in March this year that a problem had arisen in one of the spacecraft's three on-board computers: the flight data subsystem. According to NASA, a specific chip in this system had failed and data intended for Earth could no longer be sent.

The space agency's engineers decided to load the code that this chip had to process elsewhere in the system and this approach turned out to be successful. In April of this year, NASA received so-called engineering data with information about the spacecraft itself. A month later, researchers had also managed to send science data back to Earth from two of the four science instruments on board Voyager 1. NASA has recently started receiving data from all four scientific instruments again. A few years ago, Voyager1 also suffered from a broken computer.

Voyager 1 and 2 left Earth in 1977 and are now 24 billion kilometers away, outside the solar system. A message takes 22.5 hours to reach the space probe. NASA says that Voyager 2, with which contact was lost again last year, is still functioning properly.

NASA Voyager