The American Space Agency declared on April 22 that the Voyager 1 probe, located approximately 24 billion kilometers from Earth, had transmitted readable data for the first time since last November.
The furthest human-made object from Earth
The Voyager 1 probe is part of the Voyager program whose primary goal was to study the external planets of our solar system (Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune, Uranus). This was launched from Earth 46 years ago nowon September 5, 1977, 16 days after its twin probe Voyager 2.
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Given the good operating condition at the end of their primary mission, new objectives were set for Voyager 1 and 2, notably the study of very poorly known regions located at the limits of the Sun’s zone of influenceThen interstellar space. Thus, the Voyager 1 probe has reached interstellar space since August 2012 and regularly sends us very interesting data on the conditions prevailing there.
Since its launch, the Voyager 1 probe has traveled more than 24 billion kilometersdoing the most distant man-made object from our planeta record that the probe should keep for a long time to come, as it continues its journey towards the unknown.
If Voyager 1 continued to regularly transmit data to us despite its incredible distance from Earth, contact was lost by NASA scientists in November 2023. Since then, the probe has no longer sent reliable scientific and technical data on its condition.
Contact finally re-established recently!
Even if the NASA teams no longer received coherent scientific data from Voyager 1, they could still send it orders that the probe carried out normally, which means that it was not totally lost in the interstellar immensity.
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Through research, the researchers managed to pinpoint the reason why the data was no longer being sent correctly to Earth. The problem was indeed a defective chip in one of the on-board computers, responsible for formatting scientific and technical data before transmitting it to us. The program located on this chip could therefore no longer function normally and the transmitted data was therefore unreadable for scientists.
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NASA researchers therefore had to redouble their ingenuity to remotely modify computer code created almost 50 years ago. After many attempts, these finally found an ingenious solution to move the program in question on three different locations on the on-board computer and thus restart it.
NASA was therefore able to check the health of Voyager 1 for the first time since last November and will continue to implement the same ingenious solution for retrieve scientific data. Meanwhile, the probe continues its endless journey through interstellar space.
