cfive months later, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has sent signals to Earth again. This is the probe furthest from our planet and, at the same time, the one that has been in space the longest, being launched 46 years ago in the company of another twin spacecraft, Voyager 2. Last November, the last data shipment was recorded, so this news has been celebrated with considerable optimism in the North American space agency.
The ship has sent readable data about its status, internally and externally, as confirmed by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California. After this news, NASA hopes that the spacecraft will be able to send scientific data again as soon as possible, although this cannot be assured either. And Voyager 1 stopped sending readable data last November, even though the controllers They reviewed its status and observed that the ship was receiving orders and operating as usual.so at first the problem could not be located.
However, during the month of March, the team responsible for monitoring the ship was able to confirm that It all came from a problem in one of the three on-board computers, discovering that the chip that was supposed to store part of the memory of this computer was not working correctly.. This meant that the data Voyager 1 sent was illegiblesomething that could have been solved modifying software code affected telematically, making Voyager 1’s signals readable again.
Launched in 1977
Both Voyager 1 and its sister ship, Voyager 2, were launched into space in 1977. Were designed to last five years, but they have been sending information from space for 46 years. Since then, they have been sending data about our solar system back to Earth, in addition to flying around Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Specifically, Voyager 1 is currently about 24 billion kilometers away.
