Voyager 1 will send readable data from deep space

Miami (EFE) – The Voyager 1 space probe, launched in September 1977 and now more than 24 billion kilometers from Earth, has again sent back clear data after a computer glitch on the craft has been corrected, the space agency says USA. reported.

For the first time in five months, NASA engineers have decrypted data from systems aboard Voyager 1, humanity’s furthest spacecraft in space, so far away that its messages take 22.5 hours to reach Earth.

“Voyager 1 provides useful data on the health and condition of its onboard engineering systems,” NASA said in a statement.

NASA plans that the “next step” will be for the spacecraft to “begin sending back science data.”

In 2012, the space probe moved beyond the bubble of gas emitted by the Sun, a region known as the heliosphere, and is now in interstellar space, which contains gas, dust and the magnetic fields of other stars.

What was the damage to Voyager 1?

Last March, Voyager’s engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed the problem was with one of three computers on board the spacecraft, called the flight data subsystem (FDS).

Corrosion on the chip apparently prevented the data processing system’s computers from accessing a vital segment of software code used to package information for transmission back to Earth.

The problem was resolved by moving the affected code to different locations in the probe’s computer memory, NASA said.

Voyager 1 left Earth on September 5, 1977, a few days after its sister spacecraft Voyager 2.

The main task of the twin spaceship was to explore the planets Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. They completed this task in 1989, and then they were supposed to be sent into deep space, to the center of our galaxy.

Voyager 2, which flew past Uranus and Neptune, continues to operate normally after having already flown more than 20.3 billion kilometers from our planet.