After a long and worrying silence from humanity’s most distant envoy, NASA’s Voyager 1 has finally phoned home, albeit with the technological enthusiasm of a rotary-dial enthusiast discovering Wi-Fi. Having floated through the interstellar void for over 46 years, Voyager 1 decided to give mission control a cosmic cold shoulder back in November 2023 by sending back gibberish data about its systems as though it had taken up interpretive dance in binary.
The cause? A faulty chip in the flight data system decided sudden retirement was the best option mid-transmission, thus garbling the spacecraft’s data like a drunk uncle reciting Shakespeare. The malfunction rendered useful scientific information into something that looked more appropriate for a toddler’s Etch A Sketch tribute to space.
NASA engineers, proving once again that duct tape and sheer determination are as vital to space exploration as million-dollar instruments, managed to workaround the stricken chip. In April, they coaxed Voyager 1 into writing its memory to a different location because apparently even spacecraft need to be reminded where they put their keys. On May 19, Voyager responded with telemetry information in perfectly legible data, much like a patient waking up from a long nap and wondering what all the fuss was about.
This minor miracle of interstellar engineering buys Voyager 1 even more time to keep collecting data as it drifts through a region of space without any planets, destinations or reliable Wi-Fi, more than 15 billion miles from Earth. Not bad for a spacecraft built when disco was still a thing and computers filled more rooms than minds.
The probe is now once again sending back information about the status of its onboard engineering systems, and the team is working on getting the science instruments talking too.
As NASA engineers continue to coax coherent data out of a geriatric spacecraft running on 8-track logic and pure 1970s grit, it becomes clear that Voyager 1 remains a model of starry-eyed perseverance.
Apparently, “old and out of office” still works just fine 15 billion miles away.