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After months of silence, Voyager 1 has returned NASA’s calls

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For the last five months, it seemed very possible that a 46-year-old conversation had finally reached its end.

Since its launch from Kennedy Space Center on Sept. 5, 1977, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has diligently sent regular updates to Earth on the health of its systems and data collected from its onboard instruments.

But in November, the craft went quiet.

Voyager 1 is now some 15 billion miles away from Earth. Somewhere in the cold interstellar space between our sun and the closest stars, its flight data system stopped communicating with the part of the probe that allows it to send signals back to Earth. Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge could tell that Voyager 1 was getting its messages, but nothing was coming back.

“We’re to the point where the hardware is starting to age,” said Linda Spilker, the project scientist for Voyager mission. “It’s like working on an antique car, from 15 billion miles away.”

Week after week, engineers sent troubleshooting commands to the spacecraft, each time patiently waiting the 45 hours it takes to get a response here on Earth — 22.5 hours traveling at the speed of light to reach the probe, and 22.5 hours back.

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By March, the team had figured out that a memory chip that stored some of the flight data system’s software code had failed, turning the craft’s outgoing communications into gibberish.

A long-distance repair wasn’t possible. There wasn’t enough space anywhere in the system to shift the code in its entirety. So after manually reviewing the code line by line, engineers broke it up and tucked the pieces into the available slots of memory.

They sent a command to Voyager on Thursday. In the early morning hours Saturday, the team gathered around a conference table at JPL: laptops open, coffee and boxes of doughnuts in reach.

At 6:41 a.m., data from the craft showed up on their screens. The fix had worked .

“We went from very quiet and just waiting patiently to cheers and high-fives and big smiles and sighs of relief,” Spilker said. “I’m very happy to once again have a meaningful conversation with Voyager 1.”

Voyager 1 is one of two identical space probes. Voyager 2, launched two weeks before Voyager 1, is now about 13 billion miles from Earth, the two crafts’ trajectories having diverged somewhere around Saturn. (Voyager 2 continued its weekly communications uninterrupted during Voyager 1’s outage.)

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They are the farthest-flung human-made objects in the universe, having traveled farther from their home planet than anything else this species has built. The task of keeping communications going grows harder with each passing day. Every 24 hours, Voyager 1 travels 912,000 miles farther away from us. As that distance grows, the signal becomes slower and weaker.

When the probe visited Jupiter in 1979, it was sending back data at a rate of 115.2 kilobits per second, Spilker said. Today, 45 years and more than 14 billion miles later, data comes back at a rate of 40 bits per second.

The team is cautiously optimistic that the probes will stay in contact for three more years, long enough to celebrate the mission’s 50th anniversary in 2027, Spilker said. They could conceivably last until the 2030s.

The conversation can’t last forever. Microscopic bits of silica keep clogging up the thrusters that keep the probes’ antennas pointed toward Earth, which could end communications. The power is running low. Eventually, the day will come when both Voyagers stop transmitting data to Earth, and the first part of their mission ends.

But on the day each craft goes quiet, they begin a new era, one that could potentially last far longer. Each probe is equipped with a metallic album cover containing a Golden Record , a gold-plated copper disk inscribed with sounds and images meant to describe the species that built the Voyagers and the planet they came from.

Erosion in space is negligible; the images could be readable for another billion years or more. Should any other intelligent life form encounter one of the Voyager probes and have a means of retrieving the data from the record, they will at the very least have a chance to figure out who sent them — even if our species is by that time long gone.

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Corinne Purtill is a science and medicine reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Her writing on science and human behavior has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Time Magazine, the BBC, Quartz and elsewhere. Before joining The Times, she worked as the senior London correspondent for GlobalPost (now PRI) and as a reporter and assignment editor at the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh. She is a native of Southern California and a graduate of Stanford University.

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NASA has finally found a fix after the 46-year-old space probe stopped sending readable data to Earth in November. Voyager 1 can only send information about its health and status for now, but NASA says it’s working to get it back to transmitting scientific data, too.

[ blogs.nasa.gov ]

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Voyager 1: NASA's longest-running spacecraft back in touch with Earth after five months of silence

The Voyager probes are in interstellar space but Voyager 1 stopped sending back usable information in November. After months of work, NASA scientists have now heard back from the spacecraft.

By Mickey Carroll, science and technology reporter

Tuesday 23 April 2024 11:45, UK

NASA's longest-running spacecraft Voyager 1 is sending information back to Earth again for the first time since November.

Scientists have managed to fix a problem on the probe, which was launched 46 years ago, after five months of silence.

On 14 November last year, Voyager 1 stopped sending usable data back to Earth, even though scientists could tell it was still receiving their commands and working well otherwise.

Hi, it's me. - V1 https://t.co/jgGFBfxIOe — NASA Voyager (@NASAVoyager) April 22, 2024

It was first launched alongside its twin, Voyager 2. The pair are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space , which is the space between stars.

The Voyager probes send back never-seen-before information about our galaxy. Since they blasted off in 1977, they have revealed details in Saturn's rings, provided the first in-depth images of the rings of Uranus and Neptune and discovered the rings of Jupiter.

Although their cameras are switched off to conserve power and memory, they are still sending back information that would be impossible to get anywhere else.

With all this data stuck onboard and the spacecraft more than 15 billion miles from Earth, NASA scientists needed to fix the problem remotely.

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The team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California confirmed in March that the issue was with one of Voyager 1's three onboard computers. That computer, called the flight data subsystem, is responsible for packaging the data up before it is sent back to Earth.

Engineers have confirmed that corrupted memory aboard my twin #Voyager1 has been causing it to send unreadable data to Earth. It may take months, but our team is optimistic they can find a way for the FDS to operate normally again: https://t.co/qe5iQUu4Oj https://t.co/AGFBZFz53v — NASA Voyager (@NASAVoyager) April 4, 2024

Within the computer, a single chip containing some of the computer's software code had stopped working. Without that code, the data was unusable.

The engineers couldn't pop over and fix it. Instead, on 18 April, they remotely split the code across different parts of the computer.

Then they had to wait to see if their fix had worked.

It takes around 22-and-a-half hours for a radio signal to reach Voyager 1 and another 22-and-a-half hours for a response to come back.

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On 20 April, the team got good news. For the first time in five months, they were in contact with Voyager 1 again and could check the health and status of the spacecraft.

Now, they'll adjust the rest of the computer so it can begin sending back more data.

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Voyager 2 is working normally and heading towards a star called Ross 248. It'll come within 1.7 light years of it in around 40,000 years.

Voyager 1 will almost reach a star in the Little Dipper constellation in 38,200 years from now.

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Good news from Voyager 1, which is now out past the edge of the solar system

Nell Greenfieldboyce

In mid-November, Voyager 1 suffered a glitch, and it's messages stopped making sense. But the NASA probe is once again sending messages to Earth that make sense.

JUANA SUMMERS, HOST:

We recently shared news of some troubles being experienced by the Voyager 1 spacecraft. The historic NASA probe launched in 1977 to explore Jupiter and Saturn. Then it just kept going. It's now out beyond the edge of the solar system in the previously unexplored space between stars. And it still regularly talks to Earth. But in mid-November, it suffered a glitch, and its messages, well, they stopped making sense. NPR's Nell Greenfieldboyce now has this update from the Voyager team with some good news.

NELL GREENFIELDBOYCE, BYLINE: A small dedicated team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory has spent the last five months trying to figure out how to help Voyager 1, which wasn't easy because everything the poor spacecraft sent back was just incoherent.

LINDA SPILKER: That's what took the time and effort, figuring out exactly what was the problem.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: Linda Spilker is the Voyager mission's project scientist. She says they finally traced the glitch to a failed memory chip in one of the spacecraft's primitive computers.

SPILKER: And so that meant we had to move all of those pieces of code to a different place in the memory, and that's what we did.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: But it was tricky. After all, the spacecraft is over 15 billion miles away. And its computers are so ancient that the team had no way to test that their fix would really work. Still, mission managers sent out the carefully crafted computer commands. Then they waited to receive Voyager 1's response. Spilker says everyone gathered together in a conference room early Saturday morning, nervously munching on peanuts.

SPILKER: In those couple of minutes, just before that signal was coming back - 6:41 A.M. - you could have heard a pin drop in that room.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: When the signal arrived, everything looked good, normal.

SPILKER: Everyone just broke out in cheers and smiles, and it was just a huge celebration. We were in such relief, as well. Voyager 1 was back.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: Voyager 1's first messages contained information on the health and safety of its engineering systems, plus its precious antenna.

SPILKER: It looks like the spacecraft is in good shape, much like we left it back in mid-November.

GREENFIELDBOYCE: Spilker says the plan now is to find some more free memory on a working chip and put in the software that will let Voyager 1 resume transmission of its science data, so that researchers will be able to follow along as the spacecraft travels through an interstellar stew of gas, dust and cosmic rays. And the team ultimately hopes to sustain Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 for at least a few more years so that the Voyager mission will still be doing science on the 50th anniversary of its launch.

Nell Greenfieldboyce, NPR News.

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After months of sending gibberish to NASA, Voyager 1 is finally making sense again

NASA's Voyager 1 probe has resumed sending usable data back to Earth after engineers fixed a computer error that caused the interstellar spacecraft to only transmit gibberish for five months.

NASA's Voyager 1 probe is once again sending readable radio signals back to Earth after engineers fixed a computer glitch that caused the spacecraft to malfunction in November .

For the first time in five months, Voyager 1 is now transmitting usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems back to our planet, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory announced Monday (April 22). However, engineers have yet to fix the software that enables the spacecraft to return science data.

Voyager 1 is cruising through interstellar space roughly 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away from Earth, which means mission control teams have to wait 22.5 hours for their commands to reach the spacecraft and another 22.5 hours for a response. Voyager 1 and its twin probe — Voyager 2, which continues to operate normally after a 2-week blackout last year — were launched almost 47 years ago and are the most distant human-made objects in existence. 

Engineers first noticed something wrong with Voyager 1 on Nov. 14, 2023, when the probe suddenly began transmitting a nonsensical stream of ones and zeros instead of its usual neatly packaged science and engineering datasets. 

Mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands, however, indicating that its vital systems were operating normally.

Related: A mysterious 'hum' vibrates interstellar space. Voyager 1 has a recording of it.

In early March, after three months of unsuccessful tinkering , NASA engineering teams determined the issue was tied to one of Voyager 1's three onboard computer systems known as the "flight data subsystem" (FDS). The FDS is essential for packaging data harvested by the probe before they are sent to Earth, according to NASA's announcement.

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Engineers located the glitch by sending a command — or "poke" — that prompted the FDS to try new sequences of code in its software in case the issue could be resolved by skirting a corrupted section. The command triggered a signal that differed from the stream of gibberish the spacecraft had been sending back, and that engineers were able to decode . 

It turned out a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory, including some of its computer software code, had stopped working. The loss of that code meant the probe's science and engineering data were unusable, according to NASA. To get around the issue, engineers broke up the code once stored in the chip and squeezed sections of it into functioning portions of the FDS memory. 

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The team then rewrote some of the reshuffled code so it could work as a whole again.

Engineers saved these modifications to the FDS memory on April 18. Two days later, they received a response from Voyager 1 showing that the reshuffle worked. For the first time in five months, the probe's message contained readable data, prompting celebrations at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California.

However, solving the spacecraft's science data transmission will take further mending of the corrupted portions of the FDS software, NASA said in its announcement.

Sascha is a U.K.-based trainee staff writer at Live Science. She holds a bachelor’s degree in biology from the University of Southampton in England and a master’s degree in science communication from Imperial College London. Her work has appeared in The Guardian and the health website Zoe. Besides writing, she enjoys playing tennis, bread-making and browsing second-hand shops for hidden gems.

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admin said: NASA engineers have fixed a computer error that caused the interstellar Voyager 1 probe to glitch and stop transmitting data back to Earth for five months. After months of sending gibberish to NASA, Voyager 1 is finally making sense again : Read more

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Voyager 1 transmitting data again after Nasa remotely fixes 46-year-old probe

Engineers spent months working to repair link with Earth’s most distant spacecraft, says space agency

Earth’s most distant spacecraft, Voyager 1, has started communicating properly again with Nasa after engineers worked for months to remotely fix the 46-year-old probe.

Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which makes and operates the agency’s robotic spacecraft, said in December that the probe – more than 15bn miles (24bn kilometres) away – was sending gibberish code back to Earth.

In an update released on Monday , JPL announced the mission team had managed “after some inventive sleuthing” to receive usable data about the health and status of Voyager 1’s engineering systems. “The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again,” JPL said. Despite the fault, Voyager 1 had operated normally throughout, it added.

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was designed with the primary goal of conducting close-up studies of Jupiter and Saturn in a five-year mission. However, its journey continued and the spacecraft is now approaching a half-century in operation.

Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in August 2012, making it the first human-made object to venture out of the solar system. It is currently travelling at 37,800mph (60,821km/h).

Hi, it's me. - V1 https://t.co/jgGFBfxIOe — NASA Voyager (@NASAVoyager) April 22, 2024

The recent problem was related to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, which are responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it is sent to Earth. Unable to repair a broken chip, the JPL team decided to move the corrupted code elsewhere, a tricky job considering the old technology.

The computers on Voyager 1 and its sister probe, Voyager 2, have less than 70 kilobytes of memory in total – the equivalent of a low-resolution computer image. They use old-fashioned digital tape to record data.

The fix was transmitted from Earth on 18 April but it took two days to assess if it had been successful as a radio signal takes about 22 and a half hours to reach Voyager 1 and another 22 and a half hours for a response to come back to Earth. “When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on 20 April, they saw that the modification worked,” JPL said.

Alongside its announcement, JPL posted a photo of members of the Voyager flight team cheering and clapping in a conference room after receiving usable data again, with laptops, notebooks and doughnuts on the table in front of them.

The Retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who flew two space shuttle missions and acted as commander of the International Space Station, compared the JPL mission to long-distance maintenance on a vintage car.

“Imagine a computer chip fails in your 1977 vehicle. Now imagine it’s in interstellar space, 15bn miles away,” Hadfield wrote on X . “Nasa’s Voyager probe just got fixed by this team of brilliant software mechanics.

Voyager 1 and 2 have made numerous scientific discoveries , including taking detailed recordings of Saturn and revealing that Jupiter also has rings, as well as active volcanism on one of its moons, Io. The probes later discovered 23 new moons around the outer planets.

As their trajectory takes them so far from the sun, the Voyager probes are unable to use solar panels, instead converting the heat produced from the natural radioactive decay of plutonium into electricity to power the spacecraft’s systems.

Nasa hopes to continue to collect data from the two Voyager spacecraft for several more years but engineers expect the probes will be too far out of range to communicate in about a decade, depending on how much power they can generate. Voyager 2 is slightly behind its twin and is moving slightly slower.

In roughly 40,000 years, the probes will pass relatively close, in astronomical terms, to two stars. Voyager 1 will come within 1.7 light years of a star in the constellation Ursa Minor, while Voyager 2 will come within a similar distance of a star called Ross 248 in the constellation of Andromeda.

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NASA optimistic about resolving Voyager 1 computer problem

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WASHINGTON — A NASA official says he is optimistic that a problem with the Voyager 1 spacecraft that has kept it from transmitting intelligible data for months can be resolved.

Speaking at a March 20 meeting of the National Academies’ Committee on Solar and Space Physics, Joseph Westlake, director of NASA’s heliophysics division, said it appeared possible to fix the computer problem on the nearly 50-year-old spacecraft that has disrupted operations since last November.

“I feel like we’re on a path now to resolution,” he said. “They’re on the right path and I think we’re going to get to a point where Voyager 1 is going to continue, alive and kicking in space.”

Spacecraft controllers first noticed a problem with the spacecraft in November, when the data transmitted by the spacecraft was unusable. Engineers concluded that the problem was with an onboard computer called the flight data system (FDS), which collects data from the spacecraft’s instruments and other spacecraft telemetry.

Several factors have hampered efforts to correct the problem. Voyager 1, launched in 1977, is now more than 24 billion kilometers from Earth, which means it takes 22.5 hours for signals to travel between Earth and the spacecraft. None of the people who developed the FDS in the early to mid 1970s are available to assist now, so the project has had to turn to documentation to help identify the problem.

NASA announced March 13 progress in fixing the FDS when a command called a “poke” was transmitted to Voyager, and the spacecraft responded by sending back a readout of its memory. The agency said at the time it will compare that readout to one transmitted before the problem to help identify the issue.

Westlake said at the committee meeting that the problem appears to be a corrupted memory unit on the spacecraft. “It’s a part failure on one of the memories and they’re looking for a way to move a couple hundred words of software from one region to another in the flight computer,” he said. A word is two bytes.

He did not estimate how long it would take to make those software changes. NASA, in its latest statement about the spacecraft, said that using the FDS memory readout “to devise a potential solution and attempt to put it into action will take time.”

Jeff Foust writes about space policy, commercial space, and related topics for SpaceNews. He earned a Ph.D. in planetary sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree with honors in geophysics and planetary science... More by Jeff Foust

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December 4, 2012

Voyager 1 is still not out of the solar system

By Kelly Oakes

This article was published in Scientific American’s former blog network and reflects the views of the author, not necessarily those of Scientific American

Remember when I said back in October that Voyager 1 might have finally left the solar system ? Well, it turns out that the spacecraft, which has been skirting the edge of the solar system for a long time now , is finding it difficult to say goodbye.

According to scientists working on the mission, Voyager 1 has just entered a " magnetic highway ". They hope this road will lead Voyager out of the heliosphere, away from the influence of the sun's magnetic field… eventually.

Ed Stone , Voyager project scientist, based at Caltech, explained that this highway is connected to interstellar space, but is still inside the magnetic field of the Sun. It is "a new region of the heliosphere". NASA scientists are calling it a highway because it lets particles in and out of the solar system.

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The heliosphere is a huge bubble the Sun creates around itself, through the solar wind. The interstellar medium is a particle wind outside of the solar system that pushes against the heliosphere. The boundary between the two is known as the heliopause. Before Voyager got close to the edge, scientists thought the boundary would be quite clear cut. Now they are realising that it is much messier than they anticipated.

Scientists working on Voyager are looking for three key signs to confirm when the spacecraft exits the heliosphere. We should see the particles created by high energy cosmic rays increase in number, and slow particles from inside the heliosphere should disappear. Lastly, scientists think the magnetic field will change direction, from East-West inside the heliosphere, to North-South outside it. There are three instruments on Voyager to measure these three signs.

This magnetic highway is within the heliopause. If you're counting that as the boundary to the solar system (and I am ), that means Voyager is still within the solar system. But it is surrounded by particles from outside the heliosphere. "Now Voyager is in a region still in the magnetic highway where it's surrounded almost entirely by cosmic ray particles that have come in from outside," says Stone.

The first sign of this new region came on July 28 when the intensity of solar particles dropped by a factor of two, But, within five days of falling, the intensity of particles came back up. On August 13 there was another dip. And, shortly after, another return to the previous level. You can see these dips on the figure below.

You will probably also notice is that there was a third dip, around August 25. This was the graph that kick started the speculation back in October about Voyager possibly leaving the solar system. But the reality was more complicated than that.

For seven years, since it passed the termination shock in December 2004 , Voyager had been in a region where slow-moving particles from the sun randomly move in all directions. But August 25 was the day it crossed over into the magnetic highway. Now suddenly it is in a new region where particles from the sun are streaming out towards interstellar space, and outside particles from cosmic rays are streaming in. The intensity of solar particles dropped that day, and hasn't picked up since.

"We are now at the highest intensity we have yet seen of the particles coming in from the outside," says Stone. You can see that from the below figure. The top half shows the same data as above, but the bottom is the cosmic ray data.

The vital sign that wasn't ticked off in October was changes in the magnetic field data. At the press conference today, Leonard Burlaga , Voyager magnetometer team scientist at NASA's Goddard Space Flight Center, explained how the magnetic field intensity has increased and remained higher than before since Voyager crossed the boundary into the new magnetic highway region.

But there's nothing to show that Voyager 1 is outside the heliosphere yet. "There's no evidence that we have entered the interstellar magnetic field," says Burlaga.

Voyager scientists are still not sure how long it will be before Voyager gets off this highway and finally, finally, makes it out into interstellar space. "It may take several more months, it could take several more years," says Stone. "But we do believe this may be the very last layer between us and interstellar space."

Voyager's interstellar future could look a little bleak, depending on how you see it. By 2020, Voyager scientists will start powering down some instruments to save remaining power reserves. By 2025 power will be so low that all instruments will have to be turned off. After that Voyager will drift.

We may be able to ping it, now again, to check it's still there. But it won't be able to send us any data. Eventually, even the transmitter will stop working. Voyager 1 will be on its own.

In 40,000 years it'll pass by one of our nearest neighbour stars. Though even that pass, at a distance of 1.6 light years, will hardly be close. After that it'll be billions of years before Voyager gets near again to any other stars.

On the one hand, it seems sad that Voyager will wander through the stars, not able to send us information about any new worlds it encounters. On the other hand, in billions of years, Voyager might reach another star! Something humans made, out there in the universe* forever. It's quite a nice thought.

For now though, we're still communicating with both Voyager spacecraft. "We talk to both spacecraft everyday," says Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager. "They're both healthy and robust and continuing on with this incredible journey."

I'm refusing to say goodbye to Voyager 1 just yet. It doesn't seem too keen to say farewell itself, either.

*Thanks to bradmiller in the comments for pointing out that I originally mistyped 'solar system' here. Hopefully not a premonition...

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Scientists are finally getting engineering data that is not gibberish.

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Voyager 1 is back, baby!

Image Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech

Over the last several months, the most distant human-made object has been in trouble: Voyager 1 was still in communication with Earth, but scientists were receiving nothing but binary gibberish. The situation looked extremely serious – so serious that might have spelled the end of the decade-long mission. But thanks to hard work, the team has now been able to understand the issue on-board and even find a fix.

For the first time since November 14, Voyager 1 is transmitting science and engineering data that can be understood. At the center of the problem is the Flight Data System (FDS), one of the probe’s onboard computers. This device packages all the data – from the onboard system or from the science systems – before transmitting them to Earth.

In March, the team sent a poke to the spacecraft and got back another weird message. But that time, it contained everything in the FDS memory , all of its code as well as science and engineering data. From that, they were able to understand the problem and find a solution: There is a single faulty chip that stores a portion of the FDS memory and some of its code.

We can’t simply repair a chip on a spacecraft that is 24 billion kilometers (15 billion miles) from Earth. So the team had to migrate the affected code elsewhere, and adjust the code so that the system would function and not end up using the damaged portion. 

Given its distance, it takes a long time to get anything to the probe and back. Voyager 1 is 22.5 light-hours away. They sent the first fix on April 18, and on April 20 got a reply – and it looks like it worked. They had a clear readout.

This is extremely good news after months of challenging work and uncertainty. The team is at work to complete the full restructure of the FDS software. Once that is completed, Voyager 1 will once again restart its scientific mission collecting data from interstellar space.

Voyager 1 and its twin spacecraft Voyager 2 are the only two human-made objects to cross the heliopause, the region where the solar wind and the interstellar wind are in equilibrium. For years now, they have been traveling in interstellar space sending data back to Earth. And hopefully, they will continue to do so for a long time.

NASA’s planned budget for the coming years shows commitment to keeping the Voyager mission going well past its 50th anniversary in 2027.

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Voyager 1 is 15 billion miles from home and broken. Here's how NASA is trying to fix it.

A scrambled computer signal may be the key that helps NASA engineers resume data transmission from the distant Voyager 1, a spacecraft that was launched in 1977 and now, 15 billion miles from home, is the farthest a human-made object has traveled from Earth.

Voyager 1 – and its sister craft, Voyager 2 – are robotic space probes that became the first spacecraft to leave our solar system and plunge into interstellar space, 11 billion miles from the sun.

They were designed to last five years , but have become the longest-operating spacecraft in history. Both carry gold-plated copper discs containing sounds and images from Earth, contents that were chosen by a team headed by celebrity astronomer Carl Sagan .

Voyager 2, now 12.7 billion miles from Earth, is functioning normally. However, a computer problem aboard Voyager 1 on Nov. 14, 2023, corrupted the stream of science and engineering data the craft is sending to Earth, making it unreadable , arstechnica.com reported.

Voyager 1 can receive communications from Earth. It is still transmitting, but its returning signals have been replaced “with a monotonous dial tone ,” according to space.com.

Unable to see our graphics? Click here to see them .

What's the problem with Voyager 1?

NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory engineers traced the problem to one of Voyager’s three onboard computers, one called a Flight Data System. The system collects information, including:

◾ Data from science instruments that monitor cosmic rays, solar wind particles, the sun's magnetic field, and other phenomena.

◾ Engineering data on spacecraft operating systems.

The Flight Data System gives that information to the spacecraft’s Telemetry Modulation Unit. The The unit converts the data to binary code – consisting of zeros and ones, the simplest form of computer code – then transmits that code to Earth, using Voyager's 12-foot antenna dish.

The data is received by NASA's Deep Space Network , giant 112-foot radio antennas placed around the world. The network handles space communications from several missions.

In November, the Telemetry Modulation Unit transmissions became a repeating pattern of zeros and ones " as if it were stuck ," NASA said.

Engineers restarted the Flight Data System in December, but that failed to fix the problem.

Voyager 1 is far away – and it's getting old

Voyager 1 has been in space for more than 46 years. Attempts to fix problems aboard the spacecraft often mean "consulting original, decades-old documents written by engineers who didn’t anticipate the issues that are arising today," NASA says. 

Engineers have consulted archived documents to find solutions to other Voyager problems in the past, wired.com says.

Engineers need time to understand how new commands will affect the spacecraft and to avoid unintended consequences. It's a complicated, time-consuming process.

A long time lag makes solving the problem more difficult. Voyager is moving at about 38,000 mph. It takes 22.5 hours for an Earth radio signal to reach Voyager and another 22.5 hours for the spacecraft’s reply to reach antenna networks on Earth.

That means engineers must wait 45 hours to get a response and learn if a command has been successful.

What was the key computer signal?

The key signal was received after engineers "poked" the spacecraft.

◾ March 1: Teams send a command known as a “poke” to Voyager. In essence, the poke tells the Flight Data System to try different sequences in its software program, in the hope a corrupted portion can be found and bypassed.

◾ March 3: Engineers receive a new signal from Voyager that is different from both the unreadable dial tone and the spacecraft’s original transmission stream.

◾ March 7: Engineers begin decoding the signal.

◾ March 10: A Deep Space Network engineer finishes decoding the new signal and finds it contains a readout of the spacecraft’s entire Flight Data System memory. That includes instructions for the spacecraft when it receives commands or when its operational status changes. 

The memory also contains science or engineering data for downlink, NASA says.

What happens next?

Engineers will compare the readout to those transmitted before the problem started. They hope to find differences that will help diagnose the problem.

Voyager 2 was launched first on Aug. 20, 1977. Voyager 1 was launched Sept. 5, 1977. It was put on a faster, shorter trajectory, which took it to interstellar space ahead of Voyager 2.

The Voyagers are the only spacecraft in the interstellar void. NASA's New Horizons probe , launched Jan. 19, 2006, flew past Pluto in 2015 and is expected to enter interstellar space in the 2040s.

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NASA is still fighting to save its historic Voyager 1 spacecraft

The probe has been glitching for months, and the prospects look very grim, but nasa is not yet ready to give up..

For more than 45 years, the Voyager 1 spacecraft has been cruising through the cosmos, crossing the boundary of our solar system to become the first human-made object to venture to interstellar space. Iconic in every regard, Voyager 1 has delivered groundbreaking data on Jupiter and Saturn, and captured the loneliest image of Earth . But perhaps nothing is lonelier than an aging spacecraft that has lost its ability to communicate while traveling billions of miles away from home.

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NASA’s Voyager 1 has been glitching for months, sending nonsensical data to ground control . Engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) have been trying to resolve the issue, but given how far the spacecraft currently is, the process has been extremely slow. Things are looking pretty bleak for the aging mission, which might be nearing the end. Still, NASA isn’t ready to let go of its most distant spacecraft just yet.

“The team continues information gathering and are preparing some steps that they’re hopeful will get them on a path to either understand the root of the problem and/or solve it,” a JPL spokesperson told Gizmodo in an email.

The anomaly may have something to do with the spacecraft’s flight data system (FDS). FDS collects data from Voyager’s science instruments, as well as engineering data about the health of the spacecraft and combines them into a single package that’s transmitted to Earth through one of the probe’s subsystems, the telemetry modulation unit (TMU), in binary code.

FDS and TMU, however, may be having trouble communicating with one another. As a result, TMU has been sending data to mission control in a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes.

The problem first began in May 2022, when the probe suddenly started sending nonsensical attitude articulation and control (AACS) data . Engineers resolved the issue by sending the telemetry data through one of the spacecraft’s other computers. In December 2023, Voyager 1 started speaking gibberish again.

Voyager 1 is currently 15.14 billion miles away (24.4 billion kilometers), flying through interstellar space at a speed of 38,000 miles per hour (23,612 kilometers per hour). Because of the long distance to Voyager 1, it takes around two days for JPL engineers to send a signal to the spacecraft and receive a response back (22 hours each way).

“After they do that, they spend a few days digesting the information they got, consulting old documents to see if they can make sense of the little bits of information they can glean from things (since the telemetry data itself is unusable), and then send another command (that either tries to change something on the spacecraft or will provide more information),” according to the JPL spokesperson. “That takes about a week, which is why it’s been such a slow process.”

Voyager 1 launched in 1977, less than a month after its twin probe Voyager 2 began its own journey to space. But because it took a faster route, Voyager 1 exited the asteroid belt earlier than its twin, making close encounters with Jupiter and Saturn, where it discovered two Jovian moons, Thebe and Metis, and five new moons, and a new ring called the G-ring, around Saturn. Voyager 1 ventured into interstellar space in August 2012, becoming the first spacecraft to cross the boundary of our solar system.

As they travel farther away from home, each of the Voyager probes carries a message from Earth. Even if this is the last we’ve heard from Voyager 1, the probe has lived out quite the mission, and will be remembered forever.

A version of this story originally appeared on Gizmodo .

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NASA's Voyager 1 was transmitting gibberish for months but now it's making sense again

An artist’s concept of NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft.

The Voyager 1 spacecraft returned usable data for the first time in more than five months, giving hope for the 46-year-old mission to finally be able to resume its normal operations.

NASA’s favorite interstellar probe transmitted data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems to mission control on Saturday, the space agency announced . That’s great news for the mission, and the next step is hopefully for Voyager 1 to begin returning science data again.

The last time Voyager 1 sent readable science and engineering data back to Earth was on November 14, 2023. Afterwards, the spacecraft was receiving commands, but talking back to Earth in unusable gibberish . The storied spacecraft is exploring the outermost edge of the Sun’s domain, combining its observations with data from newer missions to get a better understanding of how the heliosphere interacts with interstellar space.

In March, the team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab (JPL) pinpointed the cause behind Voyager 1's nonsensical data : a single chip responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the spacecraft’s flight data system (FDS) memory.

FDS collects data from Voyager’s science instruments, as well as engineering data about the health of the spacecraft, and combines them into a single package that’s transmitted to Earth in binary code. Since the glitch, however, the mission has been sending data in a repeating pattern of ones and zeroes.

Voyager 1 is 15.14 billion miles away, which makes repairing it that much more complicated. The engineers at JPL knew that they couldn’t fix the chip, but they could try to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory.

Members of the Voyager flight team celebrate after receiving the signal back from Voyager 1 on April 20.

Instead of selecting a single location to hold all of the affected code, the team came up with a plan to divide it into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. On April 18, the mission team singled out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data and sent it to its new location.

Two days later, the engineers heard back from the Voyager 1 spacecraft. It takes around 22.5 hours to send a radio signal to the spacecraft, and another 22.5 hours to receive one back.

Over the coming weeks, the Voyager 1 team will relocate the other affected portions of the software to different parts of the FDS memory, including portions related to the mission’s science data.

Voyager 1 launched in 1977, less than a month after its twin probe, Voyager 2, began its own journey to space. The probe ventured into interstellar space in August 2012, becoming the first spacecraft to leave the heliosphere. The twin spacecraft are the longest-running missions in history, and aside from a few communication glitches, the pair are doing pretty well for their age.

A version of this article originally appeared on Gizmodo .

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We finally know why NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft stopped communicating — scientists are working on a fix

The first spacecraft to explore beyond the solar system started spouting gibberish late last year. Now, NASA knows why.

NASA engineers have discovered the cause of a communications breakdown between Earth and the interstellar explorer Voyager 1. It would appear that a small portion of corrupted memory exists in one of the spacecraft's computers. 

The glitch caused Voyager 1 to send unreadable data back to Earth, and is found in the NASA spacecraft's flight data subsystem (FDS). That's the system responsible for packaging the probe's science and engineering data before the telemetry modulation unit (TMU) and radio transmitter send it back to mission control. 

The source of the issue began to reveal itself when Voyager 1 operators sent the spacecraft a "poke" on March 3, 2024. This was intended to prompt FDS to send a full memory readout back to Earth.

The readout confirmed to the NASA team that about 3% of the FDS memory had been corrupted, and that this was preventing the computer from carrying out its normal operations.

Related: NASA finds clue while solving Voyager 1's communication breakdown case

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space in 2012. Voyager 2 followed its spacecraft sibling out of the solar system in 2018, and is still operational and communicating well with  Earth.

After 11 years of interstellar exploration, in Nov. 2023, Voyager 1's binary code — the computer language it uses to communicate with Earth — stopped making sense. Its 0's and 1's didn't mean anything anymore.

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"Effectively, the call between the spacecraft and the Earth was still connected, but Voyager's 'voice' was replaced with a monotonous dial tone," Voyager 1's engineering team previously  told Space.com .

The team strongly suspects this glitch is the result of a single chip that's responsible for storing part of the affected portion of the FDS memory ceasing to work.

Currently, however, NASA can’t say for sure what exactly caused that particular issue. The chip could have been struck by a high-speed energetic particle from space or, after 46 years serving Voyager 1, it may simply have worn out.

—  Voyager 2: An iconic spacecraft that's still exploring 45 years on

—  NASA's interstellar Voyager probes get software updates beamed from 12 billion miles away

—  NASA Voyager 2 spacecraft extends its interstellar science mission for 3 more years

Voyager 1 currently sits around 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, which means it takes 22.5 hours to receive a radio signal from it — and another 22.5 hours for the spacecraft to receive a response via the Deep Space Network's antennas. Solving this communication issue is thus no mean feat.

Yet, NASA scientists and engineers are optimistic they can find a way to help FDS operate normally, even without the unusable memory hardware.

Solving this issue could take weeks or even months, according to NASA — but if it is resolved, Voyager 1 should be able to resume returning science data about what lies outside the solar system.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.’s Open University. Follow him on Twitter @sciencef1rst.

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• jcs Funny timing for this article, when I am streaming an old Star Trek movie. So, surely this didn't cause a 3 byte glitch removing the O, Y and A from Voyager's name buffer? Get it? Reply
• bwana4swahili It is quite amazing it has lasted this long in a space environment. Reply

bwana4swahili said: It is quite amazing it has lasted this long in a space environment.

• HankySpanky So now we know even better for next time. Perhaps a spare chipset that is not redundant but is ready to take over, stored in a protective environment. A task NASA can handle. We'll find out in 100 year or so - if humanity still exists. Reply

HankySpanky said: So now we know even better for next time. Perhaps a spare chipset that is not redundant but is ready to take over, stored in a protective environment. A task NASA can handle. We'll find out in 100 year or so - if humanity still exists.

• Classical Motion I'm afraid it might self repair. And download galactic knowledge, then decide we are a danger. And turn around. Reply

Classical Motion said: I'm afraid it might self repair. And download galactic knowledge, then decide we are a danger. And turn around.

• jcs ROFLOL! And a hot bald chick delivering the bad news! Reply
• View All 8 Comments

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