Voyager 1 is NASA’s oldest probe, launched in 1977 from Cape Canaveral together with Voyager 2 to study Jupiter and Saturn, then left the solar system to explore interstellar space. The spacecraft is now 24 billion kilometers from our planet.
It all starts with a repeating, nonsensical pattern. An indecipherable series of 0s and 1s. Messages sent from Voyger 1, the farthest man-made object in space, reach NASA. It’s November 2023 and the space agency detects a serious malfunction of the probe. Now, seven months later, NASA has announced that the spacecraft, 24 billion kilometers from our planet, it started working again.
“Voyager 1 is gathering information about space again.” The four instruments on board to measure plasma waves, magnetic fields and particles in interstellar space, they started broadcasting again data. Minor operations will be needed to resolve the problem, such as resynchronizing the timing software of the three on-board computers, but “the result marks significant progress towards restoring the spacecraft to normal operations,” NASA explained.
Voyager 1 is not only the farthest object in space, but it is also NASA’s oldest probe, according to the space agency the nuclear-powered generators of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 will shut down in 2025. However, the probe has already broken many records, “the Voyager probes are going much, much further than their intended objectives, and longer than any other spacecraft in history”, explained NASA. The hope is that they can reach their fiftieth anniversary in 2027.
Because the Earth continues to receive laser messages from space: they arrive from millions of kilometers
What happened to Voyager 1
NASA scientists realized in November that something was wrong. The telecommunications unit of the flight data system was in fact sending a repeated and nonsensical pattern.
It had already happened, in May 2022. NASA engineers had received telemetry data completely wrongwith the AACS system (acronym for Attitude Articulation and Control System) which sends incorrect information both on orientation and position in space.
In February, Suzanne Dodd, project manager of the Voyager mission, explained that the spacecraft had “never faced a problem this severe” since the mission began in 2010. Then in April NASA received the first “usable data” sent back from Voyager. This includes information on the health status of the probe. They were then reactivated in May two of the four scientific instruments on board.
The story of NASA’s oldest spacecraft
Voyager communicates with Earth through the Telecommunications unit which sends information using binary code. It is NASA’s oldest probe, launched in 1977 from Cape Canaveral together with Voyager 2 to study Jupiter and Saturn, then left the solar system to explore interstellar space.
In 1990 he took a historic photo of the Earth, known as the “pale blue dot“. In 2012 it became the first probe to cross interstellar space and since then, together with his twin, he has been harvesting data on the heliosphere, the space around the sun directly under the influence of the sun. Sound recordings and images showing humanity and life on Earth were uploaded to both spacecraft.
