NASA's triumph: Voyager I contacts Earth from 15.85 billion miles away

Huge success for NASA: after the disappointing failure of the 46-year-old Voyager I in November, the team has successfully re-established contact with it. A specially crafted update was key to fixing the spacecraft, which is located 15.85 billion miles away from Earth.

It's been a while since we've received such uplifting news from NASA headquarters. Amidst its recent competition with Elon Musk's SpaceX, the American space agency has finally shared some positive developments. Remarkably, on April 19th, the team working on the Voyager projects managed to reestablish contact with the initial model.

The challenge began on November 14, 2023, marking the last instance the spacecraft transmitted clear engineering and scientific data back to Earth. After that, communication broke down. Although Voyager I remained functional and continued to receive messages from American scientists, it stopped sending back data.

Since the failure in November, NASA's team has devoted themselves to diagnosing the issue. They swiftly pinpointed a chip—tasked with memory storage—as the root cause. This chip, or the code it contained, was crucial for sending clear messages from the spacecraft.

Regrettably, given the vast distance of 15.85 billion miles from Earth, repair options were severely limited. Directly replacing the faulty chip was out of the question, forcing those working on the Voyagers to contemplate alternative solutions. Furthermore, the considerable data storage presented a challenge, as no other memory carriers could accommodate it.

Yet, the NASA scientists remained undeterred, creatively devising a method to partition the code from the damaged chip. This strategy allowed the fragmented code to be relocated to other memory systems, effectively restoring the spacecraft's operational capabilities. Achieving this feat required sending an update to Voyager I, a process that took 48 hours for the transmission to complete each way.