Voyager 1, the spacecraft sent by NASA to the depths of space, returned from death

NASA’s spacecraft Voyager 1 lost communications following a technical issue in December 2023 and reconnected in March. NASA determined the problem was a memory issue, and in April the spacecraft began sending data from both instruments.

On May 19, it sent data from all four devices, making the first scientific data transfer since the failure.

Engineers Have Concerns About Both Energy and Heat

In its statement yesterday, the US National Aeronautics and Space Administration announced that Voyager 1 started transferring data to all four science instruments, and also stated that the probe, which returned to normal, needed cleaning.

“This is the first flight software update for a spacecraft in the interstellar environment,” Linda Spilker, scientific officer of the Voyager project, said in a statement yesterday.

Additionally, the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, launched in 1977, were the first spacecraft to enter the interstellar medium, with Voyager 1 being 24 billion km away and Voyager 2 being at least 20 billion km away from Earth, he said.

Spilker said that the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft, which have been traveling in space for 47 years, faced the possibility of running out of fuel, and emphasized that fuel should be saved by turning off non-vital systems such as the spacecraft’s heaters.

NASA wants the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft to continue their missions and celebrate their 50th anniversaries until 2027. To achieve this goal, engineers plan to carefully manage the remaining energy and heat of the spacecraft.