NASA re-establishes contact with Voyager 1, sparking renewed hope

After four months of silence, Voyager 1 has re-established contact. This development reignites hope for solving the technical issues that have hindered communication between the spacecraft and Earth.


Since November 2023, Voyager 1, which has been journeying through space for nearly 50 years, faced difficulties with its onboard computers. The probe continued to send radio signals to Earth without conveying usable data, leaving scientists baffled. This issue led NASA to intervene directly by sending a specific command on March 1 to correct the malfunction. This initiative proved successful: a new signal has been received and decoded by engineers, shedding potential light on recent communication problems.

The core issue appears to lie with one of the three onboard computers, specifically within the flight data system (FDS), crucial in preparing scientific and engineering data before transmission to Earth. In response, NASA modified certain FDS software sequences to bypass potentially corrupted data, a tricky technical adjustment given the staggering distance of over 14.9 billion miles (more than 24 billion kilometers) that separates Voyager 1 from our planet. The radio signals take about 22.5 hours to cover this distance, highlighting the immense challenge of communicating with such a distant probe.

The analysis of the newly received signals has revealed a complete memory readout of the FDS, including crucial instructions and potentially modifiable data. This represents a significant breakthrough, as it will allow scientists to compare the current state of the system with that before the problem, hoping to pinpoint the exact origin of the malfunctions.

Launched in 1977, just weeks before its twin probe Voyager 2, Voyager 1's initial mission was to explore Jupiter and Saturn. However, nearly five decades later, the mission continues far beyond the boundaries of our Solar System, making Voyager 1 the farthest human-made object from Earth.