Voyager-1 is Back Online
pkrasimirov writes:
https://www.bbc.com/news/science-environment-68881369
The 46-year-old Nasa spacecraft is humanity's most distant object.
A computer fault stopped it returning readable data in November but engineers have now fixed this.
For the moment, Voyager is sending back only health data about its onboard systems, but further work should get the scientific instruments back online.
Voyager-1 is more than 24 billion km (15 billion miles) away, so distant, its radio messages take fully 22.5 hours to reach us.
"Voyager-1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems," Nasa said in a statement.
"The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again."
[...] A corrupted chip has been blamed for the ageing spacecraft's recent woes.
This prevented Voyager's computers from accessing a vital segment of software code used to package information for transmission to Earth.
For a period of time, engineers could get no sense whatsoever out of Voyager, even though they could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally.
The issue was resolved by shifting the affected code to different locations in the memory of the probe's computers.
Previously:
NASA Knows What Knocked Voyager 1 Offline, but It Will Take a While to Fix
Voyager 1 Starts Making Sense Again After Months of Babble
Humanity's Most Distant Space Probe Jeopardized by Computer Glitch
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