Our farthest-away spacecraft isn’t finished yet.
NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft, at over 15 billion miles away and hurtling ever-deeper into the cosmos, beamed back crucial data about its health for the first time in five months. NASA released a photo of mission engineers celebrating the success of their software patch with raised arms and wide grins.
“After some inventive sleuthing, the mission team can — for the first time in five months — check the health and status of the most distant human-made object in existence,” the space agency said in an online post.
NASA spacecraft keeps on going faster and faster and faster
The pioneering and beloved Voyager 1, however, isn’t completely out of the woods. “The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again,” NASA explained. Before the mishap, which began in November 2023, Voyager 1 was returning unprecedented data about the radiation in interstellar space and how far the sun’s protective bubble of energy and particles extends into the cosmos. (Its sister craft, Voyager 2, at over 12 billion miles, continues to send back this information.)
“The science data that the Voyagers are returning gets more valuable the farther away from the Sun they go, so we are definitely interested in keeping as many science instruments operating as long as possible,” Linda Spilker, Voyager’s project scientist, said last year.
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Credit: NASA / JPL-Caltech
Though NASA has repeatedly fixed software glitches on the aging Voyager craft, each over a half-century-old now, the situation was prolonged enough to grow worrisome. Early this month, the space agency noted “corrupted memory” had indeed caused the interstellar probe to send back indecipherable information. One of the onboard computers, the flight data subsystem (FDS), had a single chip that no longer worked.
What’s more, engineers couldn’t just pop the hood. “Space is hard. Interstellar space is harder,” NASA posted on X (formerly Twitter), in February. “Solving issues like this takes time – because it takes more than 22 hours for a message to travel from Earth to my twin Voyager 1 and another 22 hours for a response to make it back.”
“Space is hard. Interstellar space is harder.”
As the corrupted chip couldn’t be replaced, NASA engineers sent a deep space signal to Voyager to store the chip’s unique code in other chips, as “no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.” It worked.
What’s next? Voyager engineers will similarly now move and test code responsible for the mission’s science data.
Beyond inevitable software mishaps on old hardware (hardware that’s also exposed to the hostile particles zipping through interstellar space, known galactic cosmic rays), the probes’ greatest limiting factor is nuclear fuel. Supplies are running low; in the next few years, some scientific instruments will likely need to be powered down. It’s possible that NASA can keep the Voyager craft communicating through the mid-2030s.
Yet even when communication ceases, the mission will carry on. Voyager craft carry “a kind of time capsule, intended to communicate a story of our world to extraterrestrials,” the space agency explained. “The Voyager message is carried by a phonograph record, a 12-inch gold-plated copper disk containing sounds and images selected to portray the diversity of life and culture on Earth.”
If anyone beyond Earth ever gets to listen, they’ll be lucky: The records contain tunes from Chuck Berry.
