Pushing the boundaries of space, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has re-established data communication with Earth after five months of silence. This was the first time since November 2023 due to a chip failure in one of the spacecraft’s onboard computers.
A memory chip in Voyager 1’s flight data subsystem (FDS), which encodes engineering data, failed, stopping data transmission. NASA’s JPL engineers fixed the issue by changing FDS memory codes. Thanks to this novel method, Voyager 1’s health and status data reached Earth again.
After receiving Voyager 1’s health and status data for the first time in five months, the flight crew celebrates in a conference room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on April 20.
Cosmic Comeback: Communication Triumph of Voyager 1
Voyager 1, the first human-made object to enter interstellar space, has been traveling across deep space for over 35 years. On November 14, 2023, 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away, it stopped delivering scientific and engineering data.
In March, JPL did a comprehensive FDS memory readout to find the problem. Since fixing the chip was impossible, they placed the codes in separate FDS memory locations. Furthermore, this method worked using Voyager 1 data on April 20 to check its health.
A New Page in Voyager 1’s Space Odyssey
This event once again demonstrates the importance of Voyager 1’s presence in space. The spacecraft remains the only object to explore the frontiers of interstellar space. Together with its twin Voyager 2, they are the only man-made objects to have explored deep space not under the influence of the Sun. To conclude, Voyager 1’s re-establishment of communication opens a new era in space exploration and expands the boundaries of human presence in space.
