Several months after a grave computer problem seemed to spell the end for Voyager 1, which for nearly a half century had provided data on the outer planets and the far reaches of the solar system, NASA announced Thursday that it had restored the spacecraft to working order.
“The spacecraft has resumed gathering information about interstellar space,” NASA said in its announcement about Voyager 1, the farthest human-made object in space.
Since the problem surfaced in November, engineers had been working to diagnose and resolve the issue, a tedious and lengthy process complicated by the fact that it takes almost two days to send and receive information from Voyager 1, which was the first human-made object to enter interstellar space and is currently more than 15 billion miles from Earth.
The space community had been holding its breath since last year as the prospect of fixing the aging probe appeared as dire as ever.
In February, Suzanne Dodd, the Voyager mission project manager, said the problem, which hindered Voyager 1’s ability to send coherent engineering and science data back to Earth, was “the most serious issue” the probe had faced since she began leading the mission in 2010.
Voyager 1 and its twin probe, Voyager 2, were launched in 1977 on a mission to explore the outer planets. NASA capitalized on a rare alignment in the solar system that enabled the probes to visit the four outer planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — by using the gravity of each to swing to the next.
Its planetary mission a success, Voyager 1 continued its journey toward the edge of the solar system, and in 1990 it snapped a fabled photo of the Earth — a tiny speck in an infinite darkness that became known as the “pale blue dot.”
In 2012, the probe became the first to cross into interstellar space. Perhaps as profound as the pale blue dot, each spacecraft is equipped with a golden phonograph record loaded with sound recordings and images showing humanity and life on Earth, begging to one day be discovered by another civilization.
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