NASA sends software update 24 billion kilometres to restore communication with Voyager 1
Humanity's most distant spacecraft — which fell silent in November — is once again sending status reports after NASA engineers working with a two-day communication delay devised a software fix for a failed computer chip.
www.abc.net.au
In short: NASA engineers were able to diagnose a failed computer chip and engineer a software fix for the spacecraft, which is more than 24 billion kilometres from Earth.
NASA says the spacecraft is now returning status data but not yet science data.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was mankind's first spacecraft to enter the interstellar medium, in 2012, and is currently more than 24 billion kilometres from Earth.
Messages sent from Earth take about 22.5 hours to reach the spacecraft.
Its twin, Voyager 2, also left the solar system in 2018 as it was tracked by Australia's Parkes radio telescope.
Australia was also vital to a 2023 search for Voyager 2 after signals were lost, with Canberra's Deep Space Communication Complex monitoring for signals and then sending a successful command to shift the spacecraft's antenna 2 degrees.
Both Voyager spacecraft carry "Golden Records": 12-inch, gold-plated copper disks intended to convey the story of our world to extraterrestrials.
These include a map of our solar system, a piece of uranium that serves as a radioactive clock allowing recipients to date the spaceship's launch, and symbolic instructions that convey how to play the record.
The contents of the record, selected for NASA by a committee chaired by legendary astronomer Carl Sagan, include encoded images of life on Earth, as well as music and sounds that can be played using an included stylus.
What next? Their power banks were expected to be depleted sometime after 2025, but Dr Spilker said several systems had been turned off, so they were hopeful the two spacecraft would function into the 2030s.
They will then continue to wander the Milky Way, potentially for eternity, in silence.
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