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.
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'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. "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."
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.
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. 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.
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