The probe, which is now about 24 billion kilometers from Earth, is fully operational again: after damage to a memory chip on 14 November 2023, the instruments on board have resumed sending information on plasma waves, fields magnetic particles and particles in interstellar space
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The Earth is once again receiving data from space from Voyager 1. The NASA probe, after a period of interruption due to damage to the system, has returned to being fully operational: all four instruments on board, which measure the Plasma waves, magnetic fields and particles in interstellar space have started transmitting data again. The fault was reported on November 14, 2023 in a memory chip in one of the computers. Since then the Earth had no longer received signals from the probe: it took a few months before the engineers managed to completely solve the problem.
The journey of Voyager 1
At this moment the probe is about 24 billion kilometers from Earth. Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, celebrate 47 years of activity this year, thus achieving the record of the longest-lived NASA spacecraft that arrived furthest from home. The technicians’ hope is to be able to extend the life of the probes for at least the next decade: if Voyager 1 managed to reach 2035, it would be at a distance of about 30 billion kilometers from our planet.
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The damage to the memory chip
On November 14, 2023, damage was recorded to a memory chip in one of the computers which explained the incomprehensible messages that the probe had started sending. The problem was partially resolved last April, when the Voyager engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory rewrote the software to avoid using that chip. This had restored communications with the probe. Then on May 19th there was the next step, which was to transmit a command to tell Voyager to start sending scientific data again. Two of the four instruments responded immediately, the other two required additional work which has now paid off. However, some 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 on Earth twice a year, while most scientific data is not recorded but transmitted directly.
