Voyager 1 has just sent back a message scientists could understand for the first time in months, ever since Voyager 1 started having a communication problem in November 2023, CNN reports.
Voyager 1 originally launched in 1977 and, according to real-time data by NASA, it is over 15 billion miles away from Earth.
Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, were originally sent to explore the outer gas planets Jupiter and Saturn, per NASA. In the 40-plus years they have spent exploring the solar system, they are currently in the interstellar space region, which is beyond the influence of our sun, and send back data through the Deep Space Network.
Voyager 1′s gibberish problem
Scientific American reports that Voyager 1 was only designed to last four years, but now that it has lasted over 40 years, the space probe has had to shut down several of its instruments to stay functioning. It’s takes at least an Earth day to receive communication from Voyager 1.
Back in December 2023, NASA announced that the Voyager 1 was not sending back important scientific data that tells scientists about the health and status of the space probe; normally, Voyager 1 sends back data in a binary code full of ones and zeros, but scientists noticed that it started sending a repeating binary code “as if it were stuck”.
Thus started the monthslong effort to fix Voyager 1′s gibberish problem.
How scientists fixed it
According to NASA, since Voyager 1 is so old, scientists had to go back to the original paperwork created by Voyager 1′s original engineers to find clues as to how to fix these new problems — and how to avoid creating more problems. Voyager 1 records data on an old-fashioned digital tape, per The Guardian, and has less than 70 kilobytes of memory left.
In order to find out what was causing all the gibberish, scientists sent a “poke” command that would change the way Voyager 1′s flight data system ran its software, CNN reports. In doing so, they were able to receive code that included a section that could be deciphered by scientists. And what they found was that part of the flight data system was corrupted.
Scientific American explains that a chip in the flight data system wasn’t working anymore, which was causing Voyager 1′s gibberish. CNN reports that this chip is responsible for storing some of the computer software code, but there was no way for NASA to fix it. Instead, they had to store this chip’s memory in other parts of the flight data system.
Once they were able to do this, NASA reported that they were able to receive data about the health and status of Voyager 1 this week. The Guardian explains that scientists expect communications with both Voyager space probes to be lost in about a decade due to their power systems; they are too far away from the sun to create solar power, so they must create electricity by “converting the heat produced from the natural radioactive decay of plutonium.”