NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

For the first time since November, NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed that the issue was tied to one of the spacecraft's three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem. The FDS is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it's sent to Earth. The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft's engineering data. A radio signal takes about 22 hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles from Earth, and another 22 hours for a signal to come back to Earth. Launched over 46 years ago, the twin Voyager spacecraft are the longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history.