Voyager 1 resumes sending readable status updates after five months of repairs

April 22 (UPI) — The groundbreaking Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning useful technical updates back to Earth after five months of repairs, NASA officials announced Monday.

Voyager 1, which along with its twin Voyager 2 is the only spacecraft ever to fly in interstellar space, has been unable to transmit readable data on its health or science mission since November 14.

But after lengthy and sophisticated efforts to find a technological solution, NASA revealed on Monday that its engineers had managed to once again receive Voyager’s technical status updates that can be deciphered.

However, the scientific data reports remain unreadable and are the next issue to be addressed, the agency said.

Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California confirmed that the problem was due to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, the so-called Flight Data Subsystem (FDS), which is responsible for packaging the scientific and engineering data before sending it to the earth are sent.

They discovered that a single chip in the FDS was malfunctioning, and as a solution they worked to transfer the code in the chip to a series of three other locations within the FDS – a complicated maneuver that involved a sophisticated series of changes that were necessary to ensure that the various components could still function together.

Because Voyager 1, the furthest man-made object in space, is more than 15 billion miles away, long waits of nearly 24 hours were required to complete each step of the adjustments.

But on Saturday, NASA received confirmation that the changes were complete and successful when the probe began returning readable engineering data.

In the meantime, Voyager 2 continues to operate normally, they said.

The twin spacecraft Voyager was launched in 1977 and remains the longest-running and farthest spacecraft in human history.

Before entering interstellar space, both probes flew past Saturn and Jupiter, while Voyager 2 flew past Uranus and Neptune.