The friendly voice we longed to hear is coming back to us from interstellar space 24 billion kilometers (15 billion miles) away.
After half a year of spouting gobbledegook, Voyager 1 – the most distant man-made object from Earth – sounds like itself again on the deep space radio network.
NASA scientists are excited.
“We’re back baby!” reads X’s June 15 post from NASA.
“Our Voyager 1 probe is performing normal science operations for the first time since November 2023. All four instruments – which study plasma waves, magnetic fields and particles – are returning usable science data.”
We’re back baby!
Our Voyager 1 spacecraft is conducting normal science operations for the first time since November 2023. All four instruments – which study plasma waves, magnetic fields and particles – are returning usable science data.https://t.co/3FGBOANXGl pic.twitter.com/QqgsCmup7D
— NASA (@NASA) June 14, 2024
It’s the first time in many months that the 46-year-old probe can share everything it probes on the near-freezing frontier of our Solar System, outside the influence of our Sun.
In November 2023, Voyager 1 suddenly began sending back random data that made no sense to scientists.
The problem appeared to stem from a small, damaged chip in the probe’s onboard memory system, possibly caused by age or perhaps triggered by energetic particles in interstellar space.
Because the technology aboard Voyager 1 is so outdated, NASA engineers had to consult manuals from the 1970s to try to work around the problem.
On May 19, a team at NASA managed to get two of the four science instruments aboard Voyager 1 to return readable data back to Earth.
“Kind of like when your power goes out and you have to go around the whole house and reset all the electronics… That’s pretty much what my team and I are doing right now,” Voyager 1’s official X account explained.
Now all four scientific instruments aboard the deep space probe can once again return usable data to our planet.
Kind of like when your power goes out and you have to go around the whole house and reset all the electronics… That’s pretty much what my team and I are doing now. – V1 https://t.co/DlWMZMtYaG
— NASA Voyager (@NASAVOyager) May 22, 2024
Voyager 1 and its sibling, Voyager 2, are exploring a region of space that has not yet been directly encountered by a human object, so missing any data is quite a disappointment.
These probes are the only way scientists can directly study the interstellar medium, and their measurements have already revealed important details about how our solar system is shaped and how far the Sun’s “solar bubble” extends.
While the Voyager spacecraft are often said to have ‘left our solar system’, they have only left the heliopause and have not yet entered the hypothesized Oort Cloud, believed to be the outermost region of our gravitationally bound system.
Unfortunately, both Voyagers never make it to the ice edge in a working condition, as their onboard generators keep losing power. NASA experts predict that at Voyager 1’s current speed, it will take three centuries to reach the Oort cloud. It would take another 30,000 years to get to the other side of the cloud.
Engineers predict that Voyager 1 will have at least one instrument in operation by 2025 and could continue to communicate with NASA’s Deep Space Network by 2036. It all depends on how much energy the probe has left by then.
Over the past few years, Voyager 1 has shown signs of aging. In addition to this most recent event in 2022, a damaged computer on board began corrupting outgoing messages. The issue was eventually resolved, but it took several days. Even when traveling at the speed of light, radio messages from the probe take approximately 22.5 hours to return to Earth.
The NASA team is now working to maintain Voyager 1’s digital tape recorder. This storage system records just 48 seconds of high-speed data three times a week from the plasma wave instrument on board.
This means that when Voyager 1 loses the ability to communicate properly, all other information is lost.
Who knows what we’ve missed in the last six months?