Voyager 1 Calls Home From 24.9 Billion Kilometers Away, Defying the Increasing Odds

 Voyager 1 Calls Home From 24.9 Billion Kilometers Away, Defying the Increasing Odds

Resuming routine operations, NASA's aging Voyager 1 spacecraft is bringing valuable scientific data home from a distance of roughly 24.9 billion kilometers (15.4 billion miles).

Launched in 1977, the Voyager probes have flown by numerous planetary bodies and studied them their route to the outer reaches of the Solar System, achieving remarkable success over almost 50 years. However, in order to keep the spacecrafts operating, NASA had to shut down scientific instrumentation due to the effects of time and a declining fuel supply.


Over the past year, there have also been a number of issues. For example, Voyager 1 sent back gibberish for six months until NASA was able to resolve the problem.

On October 19, the probe made its most recent mistake: it completely ceased transmitting signals back to Earth.
But by reverting to a transmitter that hadn't been in operation since 1981, the remarkable spacecraft's onboard computer managed to resolve the issue.


Soon after the transmitter was verified to be operational, NASA's Tony Greicius wrote in the Voyager Blog, "The flight team suspected that Voyager 1's fault protection system was triggered twice more and that it turned off the X-band transmitter and switched to a second radio transmitter called the S-band."

Voyager 1 had not communicated with Earth via the S-band since 1981, despite the fact that it consumes less power. Its signal is much weaker than that of X-band transmitters since it employs a different frequency. Because of the spacecraft's distance, the flight team was unsure if the S-band could be detected at Earth; nonetheless, engineers using the Deep Space Network were able to locate it.

The transmitter was functioning, but Voyager was not yet completely functional. The spacecraft started data collection with its four remaining powered-up science instruments in the week of November 18, however, after NASA confirmed that they were able to revive the X-band transmitter.

The crew is currently working to restore the spacecraft to its pre-error state, which includes resetting the mechanism that synchronizes the computers aboard Voyager 1.

Hopefully, the elderly dog will live for a few more years.