After a stunning five-month stretch in which humanity’s most well-traveled spacecraft seemed to be delivering messages in the deadpan style of a particularly exhausted mime, NASA scientists have finally managed to re-establish full contact with Voyager 1, the intrepid space probe that left Earth when disco was still considered fashionable.
The issue began in November 2023, when Voyager 1 started transmitting telemetry data that looked less like information from the edge of the solar system and more like avant-garde poetry composed entirely of zeroes. Engineers quickly deduced that something had gone wonky inside the spacecraft’s Flight Data System. For those less fluent in spaceship speak, that’s the part of the probe that takes data and packages it into neat little bundles for sending across the unfathomable void of space. Without it, Voyager might as well be just another shiny paperweight hurtling at 38,000 miles per hour toward interstellar emptiness.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory, which maintains polite conversations with Voyager from a cool 15 billion miles away, delicately coaxed the probe back to its senses. The trick involved persuading a backup portion of memory to take over the role of the corrupt part — a bit like convincing an understudy to perform Hamlet after the lead actor has fallen down a trapdoor.
A key turning point came on April 20 when Voyager 1 returned coherent data from one of its science instruments, signaling that the choreography between brain and limbs was back in business. Now, on May 19, full communication across all four science instruments has been restored. Each is happily collecting data again about cosmic rays, magnetic fields and other esoteric matters that make astrophysicists swoon and everyone else scratch their heads.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was designed to last five years and has now been functioning for nearly five decades, making it the spacecraft equivalent of your thrice-retired uncle who just keeps showing up for work anyway. It is the farthest human-made object from Earth and the only one partying solo in interstellar space, proving that sometimes the most adventurous thing you can do is just keep going.
As for what’s next, the team will continue to goad the little probe into doing science until either the power gives out or the universe finally runs out of mysteries to offer.
Turns out even in space, turning it off and on again still works wonders.