NASA has successfully developed a repair method for the faulty chip that caused the Voyager 1 probe to stop transmitting readable data in mid-November. The US space agency announced that the probe is now sending usable data to Earth again. The farthest human-made object sent into space, Voyager 1 is currently more than 15 billion miles away from Earth.
Teams at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered that the cause of the incident was a single faulty chip in the probe’s 46-year-old computer system. To fix the problem, they developed a coding solution that worked within the strict memory limitations of the system. According to NASA, the next step is to enable the spacecraft to transmit scientific data again.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was humanity’s first spacecraft to reach interstellar space in 2012. Messages sent from Earth take about 22.5 hours to arrive at Voyager 1. In addition to Voyager 1, NASA also launched Voyager 2 in 2018, which also left our solar system and contains coded images of life on Earth, music, sounds that can be played with a needle and instructions for playing them, as well as information intended for extraterrestrial life on discs with instructions written in English and Spanish.
The contents of the discs on both Voyager probes were selected by Carl Sagan and a NASA committee, including coded images of life on Earth and messages about humanity’s place in the universe. It is believed that both probes will run out of power sometime after
