NASA’s Voyager 1 Mission: The Golden Record

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft, launched in 1977, has resumed sending usable data to Earth after a period of transmitting gibberish due to a malfunctioning chip.

The Fix

• Engineers moved the corrupted code to a different location in the spacecraft's 46-year-old computer system.
• This fix worked within the tight memory constraints of Voyager 1's computer.

Continued Operation

• Despite the glitch, Voyager 1 continued to operate normally.
• Engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory successfully received health and status data from the spacecraft.

Next Steps

• The next step is to enable Voyager 1 to return science data again.
• This will involve further adjustments to its systems.

Voyager 1's Significance

• Voyager 1 is currently the most distant man-made object in the universe, more than 15 billion miles away from Earth.
• It crossed into interstellar space in 2012, becoming the first human-made object to leave the solar system.
• Voyager 1's twin, Voyager 2, also left the solar system in 2018.

Golden Records

• Both Voyager spacecraft carry "Golden Records" intended to convey information about Earth to extraterrestrials.
• The records include a map of the solar system, images of life on Earth, music, and symbolic instructions for playing the record.

Technical Details

• The recent problem with Voyager 1 was related to one of its three onboard computers.
• This computer is responsible for packaging science and engineering data before transmission to Earth.
• The computers on both Voyager probes have less than 70 kilobytes of memory in total and use old-fashioned digital tape to record data.

Future Prospects

• NASA hopes to continue collecting data from the Voyager spacecraft for several more years.
• Engineers expect the probes will eventually be too far out of range to communicate, potentially within the next decade.
• Voyager 1 is currently traveling at 37,800 mph (60,821 km/h) and will pass relatively close to a star in the constellation Ursa Minor in about 40,000 years.