A friendly voice we've been longing to hear is drifting back to us from interstellar space, 24 billion kilometers away (15 billion miles).
Voyager 1 – the most distant human-made object to Earth –
is, once again, sounding like itself on the deep space radio network, after
half a year of spewing gobbledegook.
Scientists at NASA are elated.
"We're back, baby!" reads an X post from NASA.
"Our Voyager 1 spacecraft is conducting normal science
operations for the first time since November 2023. All four instruments – which
study plasma waves, magnetic fields, and particles – are returning usable
science data."
It's the first time in many months that the 46-year-old
probe can share all that it's probing on the near-freezing borderlands of our
Solar System, outside the influence of our Sun.
In November of 2023, Voyager 1 suddenly started sending back
random readouts that didn't make any sense to scientists.
The issue seemed to stem from a small, corrupted chip in the
probe's onboard memory system, possibly caused by old age, or maybe triggered
by energetic particles in interstellar space.
Because the technology on board Voyager 1 is so outdated,
engineers at NASA had to consult manuals from the 1970s to try and get around
the problem.
On May 19, the team at NASA succeeded in getting two of the
four science instruments on board Voyager 1 to return readable data back to
Earth.
"Kinda like when your power goes out and you have to go
around your whole house resetting all your electronics… That's basically what
my team and I are doing now," explained an official account for Voyager 1
on X.
Now, all four science instruments on board the deep space
probe can return usable data to our planet once again.
Voyager 1 and its sibling, Voyager 2, are exploring a region
of space never directly encountered by a human-made object before, so missing
out on any data is quite the letdown.
These probes are the only way scientists can directly study
the interstellar medium, and their measurements have already revealed important
details about how our Solar System is shaped and how far the Sun's 'solar
bubble' extends.
While the Voyager space probes are often said to have 'left
our Solar System,' they have only exited the heliopause and are yet to make it
to the hypothesized Oort cloud, which is thought to be the outermost zone of
our gravitationally bound system.
Sadly, both Voyagers will never make it to the icy edge in
working order, as their generators on board steadily continue to lose power. At
its current speed, experts at NASA predict Voyager 1 will take three centuries
to reach the Oort cloud. To get to the other side of the cloud would take
another 30,000 years.
Engineers predict Voyager 1 will have at least one
instrument still going by 2025, and it could continue talking on NASA's Deep
Space Network through 2036. It all depends on how much power the probe has left
by that time.
In the last few years, Voyager 1 has shown signs of aging.
Apart from this most recent event, in 2022, a broken computer onboard began
corrupting outgoing messages. The problem was ultimately fixed, but it took
several days. Even traveling at the speed of light, radio messages from the
probe take approximately 22.5 hours to return to Earth.
A team at NASA is now working on maintenance to do with
Voyager 1's digital tape recorder. This memory system only records 48 seconds
of high rate data three times a week from the plasma wave instrument on board.
This means that when Voyager 1 loses its ability to
communicate properly, all its other information is lost.
Who knows what we missed the last six months?