In what can only be described as the spacefaring equivalent of turning something off and on again, NASA’s intrepid Voyager 1 spacecraft has at last resumed sending back useful data, finally managing to break a months-long silence of cosmic mumbling that baffled engineers and made tech support on Earth feel a little less smug.
The 46-year-old spacecraft, which has been wandering through interstellar space since most current smartphone users were yet to be born or even imagined, began transmitting what scientists affectionately refer to as “scientific data” again this week. This breakthrough follows a series of appropriately delicate and intergalactic interventions from engineers at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California who, in November, discovered that one of the spacecraft’s essential onboard computers had decided to take up speaking in tongues instead of relaying anything remotely useful.
Specifically, the issue lay with the Flight Data Subsystem, which appeared to suffer from a corrupted memory chip. This is quite the problem when your IT support has a 22-hour round trip communication delay and no spare parts that can be installed over Bluetooth. The solution involved a rather elaborate cosmic workaround, essentially telling the spacecraft to use a new location in memory, because sometimes even 1970s technology can be reasoned with if spoken to sternly enough.
After this memory transplant, Voyager 1 has begun sending its first normal data beams since the hiccup, including precious readings from its cosmic ray and magnetic field instruments. While it is not yet back to its full scientific repertoire, the mood at NASA appears optimistic, spurred on by the possibility of restoring the remaining instruments in due time, assuming nothing else decides to fall into a metaphorical black hole in the meantime.
Voyager 1 and its equally elderly twin Voyager 2 have been trekking through the galaxy far longer than anyone reasonably expected, now more ambassadors of human stubbornness than anything else. Having long since outlived their original mission and the tape decks they were designed with, the probes continue to send back whispers from the edge of the solar system, proving that sometimes the oldest equipment is the last to quit.
A malfunction in one of Voyager 1’s computers had stopped it from sending science or engineering data back to Earth since November of last year.
But now, with the sort of resilience that only half-century-old hardware can muster, Voyager 1 is speaking clearly once again, prompting a sigh of relief from engineers and astrophysicists who had been interpreting five months of static like it was modern art.
Yes, Voyager 1 is back, squinting at the stars and sending home postcards once more, like an elderly relative who finally figured out how to operate FaceTime.