Six months later, Voyager 1 returns to send back scientific data. NASA completes historic rescue

• The Voyager 1 space probe stopped sending readable data in November 2023.

• NASA had to combine the power of its antennas to communicate with the old ship

This photo released a few days ago by NASA shows the six antennas of the Madrid Deep Space Network pointed at the Voyager 1 space probe. NASA has just confirmed that it has received new scientific data from the probe after months of unintelligible noise. .

Six antennas work together. Voyager 1 is more than 24 billion kilometers from Earth, a distance that electromagnetic waves travel in about a day. As the probe moves deeper into interstellar space, NASA has had to combine the power of its antennas to communicate with it.

With 70- and 34-meter-diameter antennas in Madrid, Goldstone and Canberra working as one, NASA’s Deep Space Network began receiving new science data from Voyager at 160 bits per second.

NASA achieves the impossible. The Voyager 1 space probe stopped sending readable data in November 2023. With the distance and age of the mission working against it, NASA engineers were able to locate the cause of the problem in a worn-out memory chip that had corrupted some of the flight data subsystem code. .

As a workaround, the team decided to move the affected code to a different location in memory. But the ship only had a few kilobytes of memory, and no one place was big enough to hold all the source code, so they divided it into sections and changed the places the code pointed to.

The software update is complete. After resuming engineering data delivery in April, NASA completed a software update that allows Voyager 1 to resume delivering science data. Showing commitment to the mission and patience as it takes each team 22.5 hours to reach the probe.

Both Voyager 1 and its twin sister Voyager 2, launched in 1977, continue to collect valuable data on the interstellar plasma and heliopause – the region where the solar wind meets the interstellar medium and is no longer dominant.

Image | NASA/JPL

In Hatak | The rescue of Voyager 1 has begun. With 8 KB of memory, a programming language from 1957, and unprecedented latency.