Achi news desk-
Voyager 1 has finally returned usable data to NASA from outside the solar system after five months offline.
Launched in 1977 and now in its 46th year, the probe has been suffering from communication issues since November 14. The same thing also happened in 2022. However, this week, NASA said that engineers are finally can obtain usable data about the health and status of its engineering systems on board.
Slow Work
Repairing Voyager 1 has been a slow process. It is currently over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, which means that a radio message takes about 22.5 hours to reach it – and the same again to receive a reply.
The problem appeared to be its flight data subsystem, one of three computers on board the spacecraft. Its job is to package the science and engineering data before it is sent to Earth. Because the computer chip that stores his memory and some of his code was broken, engineers had to reinsert that code into a new location.
Next for engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California is to modify other parts of the FDS software so that Voyager 1 can return to sending science data.
Beyond the ‘Heliopause’
The longest and most distant spacecraft in history, Voyager 1, was launched on September 5, 1977, and its twin, Voyager 2, was launched slightly earlier on August 20, 1977. Voyager 2 – now 12 billion miles away and traveling’ n slower – continues to function normally.
Both are now beyond what astronomers call heliopause—a protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the sun, believed to represent the farthest influence of the sun. Voyager 1 reached the heliopause in 2012 and Voyager 2 in 2018.
The Pale Blue Dot is a photograph of Earth taken on February 14, 1990 by NASA’s Voyager 1 from a distance of … [+]
NASA/JPL-Caltech
Light Blue Dot
Since their launch from Cape Canaveral, Florida, aboard the Titan-Centaur rockets, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 have had illustrious careers. They both photographed Jupiter and Saturn in 1979 and 1980 before going their separate ways. Voyager 1 could have visited Pluto, but that was sacrificed so that scientists could get images of Saturn’s moon, Titan, a move that made it impossible for it to reach any other body in the solar system. Voyager 2, meanwhile, took slingshots around the planets to also image Uranus in 1986 and Neptune in 1989 – the only spacecraft ever to image the two outer planets.
On February 14, 1990, when it was 3.7 billion miles from Earth, Voyager 1 turned its cameras back toward the sun and took an image that featured our planet as “a speck of dust suspended in a sunbeam. ” Known as the “Pale Blue Dot,” it is one of the most famous photos ever taken. It was remastered in 2019.
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