After nearly seven months of technical difficulties, NASA engineers were able to restore the long-running Voyager 1 space probe to full operation. In November 2023, a spacecraft 15 billion miles from Earth began sending out something strange. , and the team has been working to get to the root of the issue ever since. Although Voyager 1 seemed to receive and execute commands perfectly, none of the science and engineering data it sent home made sense.
In , the team traced the problem to some damaged memory in the probe’s flight data subsystem (FDS) computer and were later able to retrieve two of its instruments that were sending back science data. Now Voyager 1’s four instruments are returning to sending readable data, he says. Voyager 1 was launched in 1977, so it’s incredible that it’s still going in any capacity. But now it can continue its duties by directly studying interstellar space.
