After six months of technical difficulties, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has successfully resumed sending back science data. Despite its incredible journey, Voyager 1 continues to provide valuable information about the space between stars outside of our solar system.
Voyager 1 has ventured further than any man-made object, crossing the heliopause and venturing into interstellar space. However, its compute power is far inferior to that of a modern car door opener. The spacecraft operates with just 69.63 kilobytes of memory and runs on code written in the outdated computer language Fortran 5.
Last year, the spacecraft began sending back signals without any useful data, prompting NASA to investigate the issue. It was discovered that a small portion of memory in the flight data subsystem was corrupted, affecting one of the spacecraft’s three computers. On May 17, NASA sent commands to Voyager 1 in an attempt to address the technical issue. Due to the distance of the spacecraft, it takes approximately 22.5 hours for a signal to reach Voyager 1 and another 22.5 hours for a return signal. After a tense wait, it was confirmed that the fix had been successful, and several systems, including the plasma wave subsystem and magnetometer instrument, are now operational.
Efforts are ongoing to restore Voyager 1 to normal operations, with work being done on the cosmic ray subsystem and low energy charged particle instrument. Hopefully, the remaining instruments can also be repaired so that Voyager 1 can continue to send back valuable data before its plutonium-powered system eventually runs out of power
