NASA’s Voyager 1 finally starts making sense again as it transmits useable scientific data for the first time in five months after computer glitch

The decades-old NASA Voyager 1 spacecraft has started sending readable communications again after months of sending nonsense.

Voyager 1 has been sending data from interstellar space back to Earth for almost fifty years since its launch in 1977.

However, in November a glitch occurred that rendered the spacecraft’s data about its environment and the health of its own systems incomprehensible to the NASA scientists monitoring it.

On April 20, Voyager 1, which began by visiting Jupiter and Saturn before venturing further into space, returned readable communications, confirming that it is still traveling safely through space.

NASA’s official Twitter account for the spacecraft posted a light-hearted tweet in celebration: “Hi, it’s me. – V1′.

The account also shared a tweet from the official account of NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, showing an image of excited scientists clapping with joy at Voyager 1’s latest data set.

“Sounds a little more like yourself, #Voyager1,” the account wrote.

“For the first time since November, Voyager 1 is returning useful data on the health and status of the onboard technical systems,” the report said.

Addition: ‘Next step: ensure the spacecraft can return scientific data again.’

The Voyager flight team traced the November outage to a single chip failure in the flight data subsystem, the part responsible for sending the data back to Earth.

The broken chip contained some of the computer code needed to transmit useful data.

“The loss of that code rendered the scientific and engineering data unusable,” NASA said in a statement Monday.

“The team was unable to repair the chip and decided to move the affected code elsewhere into FDS memory,” the agency explained.

A photo taken by a spacecraft Voyager 1 – as part of NASA’s mission in the summer of 1977, two spacecraft, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 – identical in every detail – were launched within 15 days of each other

The distance makes troubleshooting on the vessel a challenge.

Voyager is now so far from Earth that it takes twenty-two and a half hours for a signal to travel 15 billion miles.

However, the team’s code experiment worked and the data became readable again.

“Finding solutions to the challenges the probes face often involves consulting original, decades-old documents written by engineers who did not anticipate the problems that arise today,” NASA said in December after discovering the fault.

“Over the coming weeks, the team will move and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software,” NASA said in an updated statement Monday.

Adding: ‘This includes the parts that will return scientific data.’

Voyager was the first man-made object to leave our solar system and enter the space between the stars.

The radio antenna, which protrudes from the central circular dish like a robot insect’s antenna, is equally archaic, putting out as many watts as a light bulb in a refrigerator.

NASA had recognized that the mighty Voyager mission could not continue forever.

Still, the team hopes to keep the instruments needed to transmit data about its environment until at least 2025.

It also hopes the spacecraft will continue to travel through space, with NASA able to track its whereabouts until about 2036, when its nuclear batteries will likely run out, after which it will drift aimlessly.

Some systems are indeed outdated. For starters, internal computers have 240,000 times less memory than an iPhone.

The radio antenna, which protrudes from the central circular dish like a robotic insect’s antenna, is equally archaic, putting out as many watts as a light bulb in a refrigerator.

The built-in tape recorder, which is constantly on, differs little from that in a typical car from the 1970s.