NASA has finally received intelligible information from Voyager 1, after the most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data in November.
Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft’s coding to work around the trouble. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California declared success after receiving good engineering updates late last week.
The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data. It takes 22 1/2 hours to send a signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometres) away in interstellar space. The signal travel time is double that for a round trip.
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Contact was never lost, rather it was like making a phone call where you can’t hear the person on the other end, a JPL spokeswoman said on Tuesday.
It comes after scientists exploring the farthest reaches of our solar system detected an eerie 'hum' using the Voyager 1. Instruments on board NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, which more than a decade ago left our solar system's outer reaches, picked up the faint, monotonous sound in 2017.
Experts said it was caused by the constant vibrations from small amounts of gas found in the near-emptiness of interstellar space. It represents the background noise present in the vast expanse between star systems, according to a study published in the journal Nature Astronomy.
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Stella Koch Ocker, a Cornell University doctoral student in astronomy and lead author of the study, said: "The persistent plasma waves that we've just discovered are far too weak to actually hear with the human ear. If we could hear it, it would sound like a single steady note, playing constantly but changing very slightly over time."
Voyager 1 previously detected disturbances in the gas in interstellar space triggered by occasional flares from our sun. NASA’s Voyager 2 spacecraft had a brief blip in August before flight controllers corrected a mistake that had led to weeks of silence. Hurtling ever deeper into interstellar space billions of miles away, Voyager 2 stopped communicating. Controllers sent the wrong command to the 46-year-old spacecraft and tilted its antenna away from Earth.
Then, NASA’s Deep Space Network sent a new command in hopes of repointing the antenna, using the highest-powered transmitter at the huge radio dish antenna in Australia. Voyager 2’s antenna needed to be shifted a mere 2 degrees. It took more than 18 hours for the command to reach Voyager 2 — more than 12 billion miles (19 billion kilometres) away — and another 18 hours to hear back.
The long shot paid off, as eventually, the spacecraft started returning data again, according to officials at California’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory.