NASA's Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, is doing science again after problem
This illustration provided by NASA depicts Voyager 1. The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data in November 2023. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft's coding to work around the trouble. In mid-April 2024, NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory declared success after receiving good engineering updates. The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data. Credit: AP
DALLAS — NASA's Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, is sending science data again.
Voyager 1's four instruments are back in business after a computer problem in November, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory said this week. The team first received meaningful information again from Voyager 1 in April, and recently commanded it to start studying its environment again.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 is drifting through interstellar space, or the space between star systems. Before reaching this region, the spacecraft discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and several of Saturn’s moons. Its instruments are designed to collect information about plasma waves, magnetic fields and particles.
Voyager 1 is over 15 billion miles (24.14 billion kilometers) from Earth. Its twin Voyager 2 — also in interstellar space — is more than 12 billion miles (19.31 billion kilometers) away.
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This story was first published on June 14, 2024. It was updated on June 17, 2024 to correct the metric distance Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 spacecraft are from Earth.
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