NASA receives the first data

It all starts with a meaningless, repetitive pattern. An indecipherable string of 0s and 1s. Messages sent from Voyager 1, the farthest man-made object in space, reach NASA. It’s November 2023, and the space agency discovers a serious flaw with the probe. Now, seven months later, NASA has announced that the spacecraft, 24 billion kilometers from our planet, It started working again.

“Voyager 1 is collecting information about space again.” The four instruments on board measure plasma waves, magnetic fields and particles in interstellar space. They started broadcasting again Data. Simple operations will be needed to solve the problem, such as resynchronizing the timing software of the three onboard computers, but “the result represents significant progress toward returning the spacecraft to normal operations,” NASA explained.

Voyager 1 is not only the most distant object in space, but also NASA’s oldest probe, according to the space agency’s nuclear-powered generators. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 will be shut down in 2025. However, the probe has already broken several records, with NASA explaining that “Voyager probes go far beyond their intended targets, and longer than any other spacecraft in history.” The hope is that they can reach their 50th anniversary in 2027.

What happened to Voyager 1?

NASA scientists realized in November that something was wrong. The communications module in the flight data system was actually transmitting a repetitive and illogical pattern.

It actually happened, in May 2022. NASA engineers took over The telemetry data is completely wrongwith the AACS (short for Attitude Articulation and Control System) sending incorrect information about direction and position in space.

In February, Susan DoddThe Voyager mission project manager explained that the spacecraft had “never encountered a problem this severe” since the mission began in 2010. Then in April, NASA received the first “usable data” sent back from Voyager. This includes information about the health status of the probe. It was then reactivated in May Two of the four scientific instruments on board.

The story of NASA’s oldest spacecraft

Voyager communicates with Earth through… Communications unit Which sends information using binary code. It is NASA’s oldest probe, launched in 1977 from Cape Canaveral With Voyager 2 to study Jupiter and Saturn, they then left the solar system to explore interstellar space.

In 1990, he took a historic photo of the land known as “Pale blue dot“. In 2012 it became The first probe to cross interstellar space Since then, he and his twin have been harvesting Data on the heliosphereThe space surrounding the sun is directly under the influence of the sun. Audio recordings and images showing humanity and life on Earth were uploaded to both spacecraft.