NASA and Voyager 1 are communicating back and forth again, after the most distant human-made object in space stopped sending usable data back to the space agency nearly five months ago.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Voyager 1, which is more than 15 billion miles away from Earth, stopped sending readable data back to scientists on Nov. 14, 2023, though mission controllers could still see the spacecraft was receiving commands and operating as intended.
The Southern California-based engineering team responsible for Voyager 1 investigated the problem and learned the issue was connected to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, which is called the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS).
The FDS packages the data collected by the spacecraft before sending it back to earth.
Engineers discovered the chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory was faulty, making the code unusable.
Had the spacecraft been located on Earth, engineers would be able to go in and replace a chip, but because it is in interstellar space, engineers needed to figure out a way to move the affected code somewhere else in the FDS memory.
