Until a few weeks ago, we thought that Voyager 1 was going to die a beautiful death billions of kilometers from Earth. There was even talk of a “race against time to save humanity’s furthest space probe”. Sent into space in 1977, the probe did not communicate with Earth, and there was fear of losing it forever.
And then, miraculously, remotely, the engineers managed to identify the malfunction in one of the three on-board computers. Better still, they managed to communicate with the machine, and the spacecraft managed to send back technical data on its “state of health”.
All four sensors are operational
On May 19, the mission team performed the second stage of this repair process and transmitted a command to the spacecraft to begin sending back science data.
Two of the four scientific instruments immediately returned to normal operation. Two other instruments required additional work, but NASA announced Voyager 1 was once again transmitting data from its four science instruments. This means that the space agency is once again receiving information about plasma waves, magnetic fields and space particles.
Voyager 1 includes a recorder
In its press release, NASA specifies that the probe is now located more than 24 billion kilometers from Earth, and that it is “conducting normal scientific operations”. But also that there are still some maintenance operations to be carried out so that everything works as before. So engineers will synchronize the timing software of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers so they can execute commands at the right time.
Also planned is the maintenance of the digital tape recorder, which records some data from the plasma wave instrument sent to Earth twice a year. You should know that most of the data captured by the probes are sent directly to Earth, and are not recorded.
