NASA repairs Voyager 1

After five months of indecipherable transmissions, NASA engineers have fixed a communication problem aboard the iconic Voyager 1 probe – the most distant spacecraft in the cosmos


Voyager 1: Currently 24 billion km from Earth

High-gain antenna: Data takes 22.5 hours to reach Earth

Magnetometer boom

Radioisotope thermoelectric generators

Spectrometers, radiometers and cameras on steerable platform

Human to scale


Milky Way galaxy 
Our Solar System


Sep 5, 1977: Voyager 1 launched

Aug 25, 2012: Voyager 1 crosses heliopause and enters interstellar space, 18 billion km from Sun

Nov 2023: Issues with onboard computer render it unable to send usable data back to Earth. Engineers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory trace issue to failed chip in flight data subsystem (FDS) – one of three onboard computers

Dec: Engineering team devise plan to break code held on failed chip into sections they can store in spaces of FDS's memory

Apr 18, 2024: First fix is transmitted to Voyager 1

Apr 20: Voyager response confirms initial fix is successful. Additional commands to rewrite rest of FDS system’s lost code are scheduled in coming weeks


Sources: CNN, Jet Propulsion Laboratory, NASA
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