NASA engineers have managed to restore the long-running Voyager 1 space probe to full operation after about seven months of technical issues. In November 2023, the spacecraft, more than 15 billion miles from Earth, began transmitting strange radio signals. Since then, the team has been working to get to the bottom of the problem: Voyager 1 seemed to be receiving and carrying out commands without a hitch, but none of the science and engineering data it was sending back to Earth made sense.
in The team traced the problem to memory corruption in the spacecraft’s Flight Data Subsystem (FDS) computer, and subsequently enabled both instruments to transmit science data again. All four of Voyager 1’s instruments are now transmitting readable data. “It’s incredible that Voyager 1 is still active in any capacity, since it was launched in 1977. But now it can resume its mission of directly probing interstellar space.