After Months of Glitches and Gradual Fixes, Voyager 1 Is Fully Operational Once Again

After a technical malfunction late last year rendered all of its subsequent readings as useless, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft—which has spent nearly a half-century in space—has been brought back online and is once again fully functioning.

“The spacecraft has resumed gathering information about interstellar space,” NASA said in a press release.

Launched in 1977 and drifting some 15 billion miles away from Earth, on the outer reaches of our solar system, the satellite is both one of the world’s oldest-tenured crafts and currently the most distant—making its recovery from what was once presumed a dismal prognosis nothing short of miraculous.

Last November, the satellite began transmitting unintelligible strings of data, as opposed to the binary code it is supposed to send, back to NASA’s scientists. Initial efforts to diagnose and fix the problem were tedious. New commands took nearly a full day, 22.5 hours, to reach Voyager 1, and responses took an equal amount of time.

“Finding solutions to challenges the probes encounter often entails consulting original, decades-old documents written by engineers who didn’t anticipate the issues that are arising today,” Miles Hatfield wrote in a December NASA press release. “As a result, it takes time for the team to understand how a new command will affect the spacecraft’s operations in order to avoid unintended consequences.”

Waiting 45 hours between individual troubleshooting efforts was tedious. But incremental gains were made, and after five months of steady trial and error, the team found that Voyager 1’s problem lay in its flight data subsystem (FDS), which packages earthbound data. They pinpointed one faulty chip in particular, and were able to engineer a work-around.

In April, they enjoyed a breakthrough: a health and status report that indicated the satellite was still capable of lucid communication.

“Today was a great day for Voyager 1,” Linda Spilker, a Voyager project scientist at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), said in a statement from that weekend, CNN’s Ashley Strickland reported. “We’re back in communication with the spacecraft. And we look forward to getting science data back.”

The team didn’t need to wait long. In late May, two of the spacecraft’s four scientific instruments began sending usable scientific data once again: the “bunny-eared” plasma wave subsystem, which protrudes 30 feet off the spacecraft and measures electron density, and the magnetometer instrument, which measures and analyzes the magnetic fields of Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune.

Now, the two remaining instruments are fixed: the low-energy charged particle and cosmic ray subsystem, which measure the energy spectra, intensities, and charges of atomic species and cosmic rays. All four of the satellite’s scientific instruments are again in working order, though some additional maintenance is still required, including resyncing the timekeeping software of the spacecraft’s three computers, per last week's statement.

“NASA has previously estimated that the nuclear-powered generators on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were likely to die around 2025,” the New York Times’  Orlando Mayorquín reports.

But, if they can survive until 2027, both spacecraft will reach their 50th anniversary.

Voyagers 1 and 2 are NASA’s only spacecraft to have explored outside of the sun’s heliosphere. Over the decades, they have explored the solar system’s gas giant planets and 48 moons. They also carry the Voyager Golden Records, intended to share sounds and images of Earth with alien civilizations.

“That's here. That's home. That's us. On it everyone you love, everyone you know, everyone you ever heard of, every human being who ever was, lived out their lives,” astronomer Carl Sagan famously said in 1990 on the day Voyager 1 took the iconic “pale blue dot” image of Earth at a distance of 3.7 billion miles from the sun.

Christian Thorsberg | READ MORE

Christian Thorsberg is an environmental writer and photographer from Chicago. His work, which often centers on freshwater issues, climate change and subsistence, has appeared in Circle of Blue, Sierra magazine, Discover magazine and Alaska Sporting Journal.