In March, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered that the issue with Voyager 1’s inability to transmit readable data was due to a faulty chip. To address this problem, they developed a unique coding solution that worked within the memory limitations of the probe’s 46-year-old computer system.
Voyager 1 is currently over 15 billion miles away from Earth and has become humanity’s first spacecraft to reach interstellar space in 2012. Launched in 1977, it is now providing information about its technical systems’ health and status, with plans to enable it to transmit scientific data again. The spacecraft is still sending usable data back to Earth after stopping in mid-November.
Both Voyager probes contain gold-plated copper plates with information about Earth, intended for extraterrestrials. These plates include a map of our solar system and a piece of uranium functioning as a radioactive clock. The goal is to allow recipients to determine when the probe was launched. The contents of the discs were carefully selected by a NASA committee led by astronomer Carl Sagan and consist of coded images of life on Earth, music, and instructions for playing the disc. It is anticipated that the probes’ power sources will be depleted after 2025, leaving them to drift silently in the Milky Way.
