NASA finally received a reasonable response from Voyager 1, the spacecraft furthest from Earth, and stopped sending back intelligible data in November 2023.
Flight controllers traced pristine communications to a faulty computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft’s encryption to solve the problem.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California has declared a success after receiving good technical updates late last week.
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The research team is still working to restore scientific data transmission. It took 22 and a half hours to send the signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space.
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Signal transmission time is twice the round trip time. A JPL spokesman said that communication was never lost; it was like making a phone call where you can’t hear the person on the other end.
Launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 has been exploring interstellar space – the space between star systems – since 2012.
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Its twin, Voyager 2, is 12.6 billion miles (20 billion km) away and still working fine.
The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Education Communications Group.
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