After a worrying bout of interstellar silence that left NASA engineers refreshing data streams like anxious parents tracking their kid’s location on a Friday night, Voyager 1 has finally uttered something comprehensible from the void. The aging spacecraft, launched during the Ford administration and last seen vacationing somewhere near the edge of the solar system, has shown the first encouraging signs of recovery after a months-long data malfunction that had scientists scratching their heads and folksy engineers referring to it as “a bit of cosmic indigestion.”
It all began in November 2023, when Voyager 1, that plucky 1977 launch that now finds itself some 15 billion miles away and refusing to retire gracefully, began sending back incomprehensible gibberish. The culprit, eventually identified with the calm exasperation of a parent dealing with a child jamming peanut butter into a VHS player, was a malfunction in the Flight Data Subsystem’s Telemetry Modulation Unit or TMU, which had been reduced to sending abstract art instead of readable engineering data.
NASA engineers, faced with the rather unique challenge of repairing a spacecraft farther away than your average existential crisis, spent months devising a solution. Remember, this is a spacecraft with less computing power than the average microwave, and yet it had to be coaxed into a functional state with nothing but radio waves travelling at the speed of light and the unflinching optimism of people who wear short-sleeved button-down shirts with pens in the pocket.
The fix, implemented in April, involved nudging the spacecraft’s silicon synapses just enough to trick the aging onboard gear into behaving again. And lo and behold, last week, Voyager 1 began transmitting engineering telemetry that actually made sense again. It was a victory those involved likened to a 46-year-old giving coherent updates after years of mumbling unintelligibly about vinyl records and rotary phones.
While this is just the first step in coaxing Voyager 1 back into its full data-transmitting glory, officials cautiously celebrated the return of readable life signs. And though it’s not quite ready to start sending pictures of the galactic abyss or notes on interstellar winds, the team is optimistic they can restore more subsystems over the next few months, assuming no further cosmic curveballs are thrown by the indifferent universe.
The spacecraft, which carries a golden record just in case it runs into someone or something that still owns a phonograph and speaks whale, continues to speed into deep space at over 38,000 miles per hour, stubbornly refusing to act its age.
If there is intelligent life out there, we can only hope they read hexadecimal and have a thing for classic NASA engineering.