NASA’s 47-year-old Voyager 1 probe is back in action after months of technical problems

NASA engineers have managed to get the long-duration Voyager 1 space probe fully operational after about seven months of technical difficulties. In November 2023, the spacecraft – which is more than 24 billion kilometers from Earth – began sending strange messages, , and the team has been working ever since to get to the root of the problem. Although Voyager 1 appeared to be receiving and executing commands perfectly, none of the scientific and engineering data it sent home made sense.

In , the team traced the problem to some corrupted memory in the probe’s flight data subsystem (FDS) computer and later got two of its instruments to send science data again. Now, all four Voyager 1 instruments are back sending readable data, it says. Voyager 1 launched in 1977, so the fact that it still functions in any capacity is incredible. But now, it can resume its functions by directly studying interstellar space.