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NASA ’s Voyager 1 investigation is once again sending readable radio signals back to Earth after engineers fixed a computer glitch that caused the spacecraft tomalfunction in November .
For the first time in five calendar month , Voyager 1 is now transmit useable data about the wellness and status of its onboard engineering systems back to our satellite , NASA ’s Jet Propulsion LaboratoryannouncedMonday ( April 22 ) . However , railroad engineer have yet to fix the software that turn on the spacecraft to return science information .
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is depicted in this artist’s concept traveling through interstellar space, or the space between stars, which it entered in 2012.
Voyager 1 is cruising through interstellar space rough 15 billion miles ( 24 billion kilometers ) away from Earth , which means charge control teams have to wait 22.5 hours for their commands to reach the spacecraft and another 22.5 hours for a response . Voyager 1 and its twinned probe — Voyager 2 , which continue to operate normally after a2 - week memory loss last year — were launched almost 47 years ago and are the most distant human - made objects in creation .
technologist first notice something wrong with Voyager 1 on Nov. 14 , 2023 , when the probe suddenly began channel a nonsensical stream of I and 0 or else of its usual neatly package science and engineering science datasets .
charge controllers could recount the spacecraft was still get their program line , however , indicating that its critical systems were operating normally .
After receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in five months, members of the Voyager flight team celebrate in a conference room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on April 20.
have-to doe with : A mystical ' hum ' vibrates interstellar space . Voyager 1 has a recording of it .
In early March , afterthree month of unsuccessful tinkering , NASA engineering squad determine the issue was tied to one of Voyager 1 ’s three onboard computer system sleep with as the " flight data subsystem " ( FDS ) . The FDS is all important for packaging data point harvested by the probe before they are sent to Earth , fit in to NASA ’s announcement .
Engineers located the glitch by sending a command — or " biff " — that remind the FDS to try out young sequences of codification in its computer software in case the issue could be resolved by skirting a debased section . The instruction triggered a sign thatdiffered from the flow of gibberishthe spacecraft had been place back , and that engineerswere able-bodied to decipher .
It turned out a single chip responsible for for stack away a component part of the FDS store , include some of its computing machine software computer code , had stopped working . The loss of that code meant the investigation ’s scientific discipline and engineering data point were unserviceable , harmonise to NASA . To get around the issue , engineers broke up the code once store in the chip and squeeze sections of it into function portions of the FDS memory board .
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The team then rewrote some of the reshuffled code so it could work as a whole again .
Engineers redeem these alteration to the FDS computer storage on April 18 . Two days later on , they receive a response from Voyager 1 showing that the reshuffling worked . For the first clip in five months , the probe ’s message contained readable data , prompting celebrations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California .
However , solving the spacecraft ’s science data transmittance will take further mending of the corrupted portions of the FDS software , NASA said in its announcement .
