Voyager 1 is back! The legendary probe makes contact from interstellar space

A friendly voice we’ve longed to hear is coming back to us from interstellar space, 24 billion kilometers (15 billion miles) away.

Voyager 1 – the most distant man-made object on Earth – is once again sounding like itself on the deep space radio network, after half a year of spouting gobbledegook.

Scientists at NASA are happy.

“We’re back, honey!” reads an X post from NASA on June 15.

“Our Voyager 1 spacecraft is conducting normal science operations for the first time since November 2023. All four instruments – studying plasma waves, magnetic fields and particles – are returning usable science data.”

We’re back, baby!

Our Voyager 1 spacecraft is conducting normal science operations for the first time since November 2023. All four instruments – studying plasma waves, magnetic fields and particles – are returning usable science data.https://t.co/ 3FGBOANXGl pic.twitter.com/QqgsCmup7D

— NASA (@NASA) June 14, 2024

It’s the first time in many months that the 46-year-old probe can share everything it’s probing in the near-frozen frontier lands of our Solar System, outside the influence of our Sun.

In November 2023, Voyager 1 suddenly started sending back random readings that made no sense to scientists.

The issue appeared to stem from a small, corrupted chip in the probe’s onboard memory system, possibly caused by aging, or possibly caused by energetic particles in interstellar space.

Because the technology aboard Voyager 1 is so outdated, engineers at NASA had to consult manuals from the 1970s to try to overcome the problem.

On May 19, the NASA team managed to get two of the four science instruments aboard Voyager 1 to return readable data back to Earth.

“Like when your power goes out and you have to go around your whole house resetting all your electronics… That’s basically what my team and I are doing right now,” explained an official account for Voyager 1 on X.

Now, all four science instruments aboard the deep space probe can return usable data to our planet once again.

Like when your power goes out and you have to go through your whole house resetting all your electronics… That’s basically what my team and I are doing right now. – V1 https://t.co/DlWMZMtYaG

— NASA Voyager (@NASAVoyager) May 22, 2024

Voyager 1 and its sister, Voyager 2, are exploring a region of space that has never been directly encountered by a man-made object before, so the loss of any data is rather strange.

These probes are the only way scientists can study the interstellar medium directly, and their measurements have already revealed important details about how our Solar System formed and how far the Sun’s ‘solar bubble’ extends.

While the Voyager spacecraft are often said to have “left our solar system,” they have only exited the heliopause and have not yet reached the hypothesized Oort cloud, which is thought to be the outermost region of our gravitationally bound system.

Sadly, both Voyagers will never reach the icy edge in working order, as their onboard generators continue to lose power. At its current speed, experts at NASA predict that Voyager 1 will take three centuries to reach the Oort cloud. It would take another 30,000 years to get to the other side of the cloud.

Engineers predict that Voyager 1 will have at least one instrument still working by 2025, and it could continue to talk to NASA’s Deep Space Network until 2036. It all depends on how much power the probe has left by in that time.

In recent years, Voyager 1 has shown signs of aging. In addition to this most recent event, in 2022, a malfunctioning on-board computer began corrupting outgoing messages. The problem was eventually fixed, but it took a few days. Even traveling at the speed of light, radio messages from the probe take approximately 22.5 hours to return to Earth.

A team at NASA is now working to maintain Voyager 1’s digital tape recorder. This memory system records just 48 seconds of high-speed data three times a week from the onboard plasma wave instrument.

This means that when Voyager 1 loses its ability to communicate properly, all of its other information is lost.

Who knows what we’ve been missing the last six months?