NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, the most distant man-made object in the universe, is currently sending usable information back to ground control after a period of sending gibberish, according to the US space agency. The spacecraft had stopped sending readable data to Earth on November 14, 2023 despite receiving commands from controllers. However, in March, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered a malfunctioning chip that caused the issue and implemented a coding fix that worked within the spacecraft’s limited memory constraints.
Voyager 1 is now providing data on the health and status of its engineering systems with plans to begin sending scientific data once again. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 became the first human-made spacecraft to enter the interstellar medium in 2012 and is currently over 15 billion miles away from Earth. Messages sent from Earth take about 22.5 hours to reach the spacecraft which is also carrying a “Golden Record” intended to convey information about Earth to extraterrestrials.
Voyager 1’s twin, Voyager 2, also left the solar system in 2018 with both spacecraft including symbolic instructions, a map of the solar system and encoded images and sounds of life on Earth on their Golden Records. These records were selected by Carl Sagan and are meant to tell the story of our world and are expected to continue traveling through the Milky Way potentially for eternity. The spacecraft’s power banks are projected to be depleted sometime after 2025.
