Space probe 24 billion kilometers from Earth starts communicating again, says NASA

The space probe Voyager 1, which was launched in September 1977 and is currently more than 24 billion kilometers from Earth, returned to sending intelligible data after a flaw in the spacecraft’s computer was corrected, the American space agency reported. For the first time in five months, engineers at NASA received decipherable data.

The spacecraft is so far away that its messages take 22.5 hours to reach Earth. “Voyager 1 is providing useful data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems,” NASA said in a statement.

The agency plans that “the next step” will be “for the spacecraft to begin sending scientific data.” The space probe advanced beyond the bubble of gas emitted by the Sun, a domain known as the heliosphere, in 2012, and is now embedded in interstellar space, which contains gas, dust and magnetic fields from other stars.

Last March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed that the problem was related to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). .

Corrosion on a chip apparently prevented the data system’s computers from accessing a vital segment of software code used to package information for transmission back to Earth. The problem was resolved by transferring the affected code to different locations in the probe’s computer memory, NASA said.

Voyager 2, which flew past Uranus and Neptune, is still operating normally after having traveled more than 20.3 billion kilometers from our planet. /EFE

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