NASA’s Voyager-1After five months of radio silence, NASA has successfully reestablished contact with the venerable Voyager 1 spacecraft in a brilliant demonstration of problem-solving skills. A critical computer component malfunctioned in November of last year, causing the 46-year-old spaceship to go dark and halting the engineering data it was beaming across 15 billion miles of space.
On September 5, 1977, Voyager-1 left Earth a few days after Voyager-2, its sister spacecraft
At NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, engineers working on the Voyager flight team have been debugging a problem since November, when the spacecraft, which is located more than 15.1 billion miles from Earth, started returning random computer code.
The team received their response on Saturday, 45 hours after they had to wait to see if their plan to send the problematic code to a different location on the spacecraft’s computer would succeed.
Voyager 2 is still running smoothly. The twin Voyager spacecraft are the most distant and longest-running spacecraft in history, having been launched more than 46 years ago. Both probes passed by Saturn and Jupiter prior to beginning their interstellar journey, while Voyager 2 passed by Uranus and Neptune.
About Voyager 1
The first spacecraft to enter interstellar space and leave the solar system was Voyager 1.
According to NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Voyager 1 is now traveling across space at a speed of about 38,000 mph (17 kilometers per second).
Nobody anticipated that 45 years after Voyager 1’s launch, which was intended to investigate our solar system’s outer planets, the probe would still be crucial. Beyond anyone’s expectations, the probe has continued to operate and send data back to Earth on its travels.