NASA’s Voyager 1 calls home after months • PhilSTAR Life

NASA‘s Voyager 1 probe — the most distant man-made object in the universe — is returning actionable information to ground control after months of gibberish, the US space agency announced Monday, April 22.

The spacecraft stopped sending readable data to Earth on November 14, 2023, even though controllers could see it was still receiving their commands.

In March, teams at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered that a single faulty chip was to blame, and devised a clever coding solution that worked within the tight memory limitations of the 46-year-old computer system.

“The Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning useful data on the health and status of the technical systems on board,” the agency said.

“The next step is to enable the spacecraft to return scientific data.”

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was humanity’s first spacecraft to enter the interstellar medium in 2012 and is currently more than 15 billion miles from Earth. Messages sent from Earth take about 22.5 hours to reach the spacecraft.

Its twin, Voyager 2, also left the solar system in 2018.

Both Voyager spacecraft carry ‘Golden Records’: 12-inch, gold-plated copper discs intended to convey the story of our world to aliens.

These include a map of our solar system, a piece of uranium that serves as a radioactive clock that allows the receivers to date the spaceship’s launch, and symbolic instructions on how to play the record.

Selected for NASA by a committee chaired by legendary astronomer Carl Sagan, the record’s contents include encoded images of life on Earth, as well as music and sounds that can be played using the included stylus.

Their energy banks are expected to run out sometime after 2025. They will then continue to wander the Milky Way in silence, possibly for eternity. (AFP)