Voyager 1 is the furthest probe from our planet. Located at approximately 24,000 million kilometers from the Earth, this ship was launched in September 1977 to explore Jupiter and Saturn. However, and against all prognosis, the probe is operating almost 48 years later.
Despite this, Voyager 1 has begun to show signs of aging. In 2023, the probe stopped issuing useful data and instead sent an indecipherable and repetitive code pattern. Fortunately, NASA engineers managed to solve the problem in April 2024, after five months of communication problems.
NASA achieved the impossible
The problems began in November, when the space probe stopped sending legible data. NASA engineers managed to identify the cause of the problem: A damaged chip that was responsible for the 3% damage to the flight system memory. This ruling also caused the loss of indispensable code that left the scientific and engineering data unusable.
The team of engineers wanted to place the affected code in another location of the memory. However, there was an inconvenience: the probe had just a few kilobytes of storage, so there was no location large enough to contain it completely. The solution was to divide it into sections and change the locations to which the code pointed out.
After having made this change, On April 20 the engineers received response from the Voyager 1. With this they confirmed that the adjustment had been successful and that was how the transmission of perfectly legible engineering data was possible again. On May 17, commands were sent 46 years old to the ship, which could resume data sending to the Earth.
Construction of the Voyager probe disc 1. Image | Wikimedia Commons.
The state of the probe today
In June 2024 the ship was already operating normally from the first time from the fault. However, in October last year The automatic failure protection system was shot due to a low energy margin. This caused the probe unexpectedly off its main radio transmitter (Banda X) and changed to its secondary transmission (band S), whose signal was much weaker.
Finally, on November 18, 2024, NASA reactivated transmitter X and the ship again downloaded scientific data regularly. NASA reported that after that the engineers completed some remaining tasks to return Voyager 1 to the state in which it was before the problem arose.
In February 2025, engineers turned off the cosmic striped detector of the ship. However, it was not due to a fault, but was a planned shutdown to manage the gradual decrease in the ship’s energy supply. According to NASA, The low -energy loaded particle instrument of Voyager 1 will continue to function until the end of 2025.
Cover image | POT
