The probe Voyager 1 of NASA has returned to being fully operational And all four instruments on boardwhich measure plasma waves, magnetic fields and particles in interstellar space, they started broadcasting again data from interstellar space to Earth. The probe is currently at approx 24 billion kilometers from Earth and will celebrate this year 47 years of activity along with its twin, Voyager 2, as it makes NASA spacecraft longer-lived and those that arrived further from home. Technicians hope to be able to extend its life for at least the next decade: if Voyager 1 managed to reach 2035, it would be at a distance of about 30 billion kilometers.
After the problem recorded on November 14, 2023 with a memory chip in one of the computers, which was the basis of the incomprehensible messages that the probe had started to send, the problem was partially resolved last April, when the Voyager engineering team at the NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory rewrote the software to avoid using that chip. This had restored communications with the probe. The next step, which took place on May 19, was to transmit a command to tell Voyager to resume sending scientific data: two of the four instruments responded immediately, while the other two required additional work, which fortunately paid off .
Further small adjustments will still be necessary to resolve all consequences caused by the initial failure. Among other things, engineers will have to resynchronize the timing software of the three on-board computers, so that they can execute commands at the right time, and they will have to perform maintenance on the digital recorder, which keeps track of some data that is then sent to the Earth twice a year, while most scientific data is not recorded but transmitted directly.
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