NASA’s 47-year-old Voyager 1 probe is back in action after months of technical issues

NASA engineers have managed to get the long-running Voyager 1 space probe fully back in working order after some seven months of technical difficulties. In November 2023, the spacecraft — which is more than 15 billion miles from Earth — started sending back strange, unreadable data, and the team has been working ever since to get to the root of the issue. While Voyager 1 seemed to be receiving and executing commands just fine, none of the science and engineering data it sent home made sense.

In April, the team traced the problem to some corrupted memory in the probe’s flight data subsystem (FDS) computer and was later able to get two of its instruments sending science data again. Now, all four of Voyager 1’s instruments are back to sending readable data, NASA says. Voyager 1 launched in 1977, so the fact that it’s still going in any capacity is incredible. But now, it can resume its duties directly studying interstellar space.

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