Voyager 1 of NASA calls home after many months

Washington: After months of spewing gibberish, NASA’s Voyager 1 probe, the furthest distant man-made object in the cosmos, is now providing ground control with useful information, the US space agency reported on Monday.

On November 14, 2023, the spacecraft ceased transmitting legible data to Earth, but commanders could see it was still taking directions.

Teams at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory identified a single faulty chip as the cause in March and came up with a creative coding solution that operated within the limited memory of the system, which is 46 years old.

“The Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems,” according to NASA.

“The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again.”

Voyager 1, the first spacecraft ever launched by humans, entered the interstellar medium in 2012 and is presently located more than 15 billion miles from Earth. Voyager 1 was launched in 1977. It takes around 22.5 hours for messages delivered from Earth to reach the spaceship.

2018 saw the departure of Voyager 2, its twin, from the solar system.
The “Golden Records” that both Voyager spacecraft are carrying are 12-inch copper disks that are coated in gold and are meant to tell extraterrestrials about our planet.

Symbolic instructions on how to play the record are included, along with a map of our solar system and a chunk of uranium that acts as a radioactive clock to enable receivers to timestamp the spaceship’s launch.

Selected for NASA by a committee led by renowned astronomer Carl Sagan, the record has noises and music that may be played with the accompanying stylus in addition to encoded pictures of Earthly life.
It is anticipated that their power batteries will run out by 2025. After that, they may roam the Milky Way silently for all of eternity.