The cause of the problem was a faulty chip, for which Nasa developed an ingenious repair method.
Voyager 1 probe is sending usable data to Earth again, says the US space agency Nasa. Voyager 1 is the farthest of all human-made objects sent into space.
The probe had stopped transmitting readable data in mid-November, although it reportedly continued to receive commands.
In March, teams working at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered that the cause of the incident was a single faulty chip. To fix the problem, an ingenious coding solution was developed that worked within the strict memory limitations of the probe’s 46-year-old computer system.
“The Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning actionable information about the health and status of its onboard technical systems,” Nasa said.
“The purpose of the next step is to enable the spacecraft to transmit scientific data again.”
In the year Voyager 1, launched in 1977, was humanity’s first spacecraft to reach interstellar space in 2012. It is currently more than 15 billion miles, or more than 24 billion kilometers, from Earth. Messages sent from Earth take about 22.5 hours to arrive at the probe.
In 2018, the Voyager 2 probe also left our solar system.
The Voyager probes contain 12-inch gold-plated copper plates intended to convey the story of our world to extraterrestrials.
Included are a map of our solar system and a piece of uranium that acts as a radioactive clock that allows recipients to determine the date of the probe’s launch. In addition, the sounder has symbolized instructions for playing the disc.
The contents of the discs were selected by a legendary astronomer Carl Saganin led by a NASA committee. The discs have coded images of life on Earth, as well as music and sounds that can be played with the included needle.
It is believed that the power sources of the probes will run out sometime after 2025, after which they will continue to roam the Milky Way in complete silence.