(MENAFN) On Tuesday, NASA announced a significant milestone for the Voyager 1 space probe, as it successfully transmitted an intelligible message to Earth for the first time in months. The achievement came after NASA engineers resolved a communication issue within the 47-year-old satellite.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 continues its pioneering journey into deep space, maintaining its position as the farthest human-made object from Earth, currently situated at an impressive distance of 24.1 billion kilometers (over 14.9 billion miles). Recently, NASA announced that Voyager 1 has successfully transmitted "usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems" after a period of communication silence.
Since November 14, 2023, Voyager 1 had been sending back incomprehensible signals to Earth. Nevertheless, the spacecraft remained operational and continued to respond to commands from mission controllers during this period.
"The source of the issue appears to be with one of three onboard computers, the flight data subsystem (FDS), which is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it's sent to Earth by the telemetry modulation unit," it further mentioned.
As a consequence of its interstellar location, signals transmitted from Voyager 1 require approximately 20 hours and 33 minutes to reach our planet.
This lengthy travel time results in nearly a two-day round trip for messages exchanged between Voyager 1 and NASA. Concurrently, NASA is working diligently to reestablish communication with the Voyager 2 spacecraft, which was lost after an erroneous command was sent.
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