NASA Triumphs: Voyager I contact restored after innovative repair

Huge success for NASA. After the November failure of the 46-year-old Voyager I, it has been possible to re-establish contact with it. A specially constructed update was used to repair the spacecraft, located approximately 25 billion kilometres away from Earth.

It has been a while since such positive news has come from NASA headquarters. The American company finally shared some good news after the latest competition with Elon Musk's developing SpaceX. As it turned out, on April 19th, scientists working on the Voyagers were able to reestablish contact with the first model.

This model had been out of NASA scientists' reach since November 14, 2023. That was the last time the spacecraft sent clear engineering and scientific data to Earth. However, something went wrong after that. Voyager I, while functioning correctly and picking up messages from American scientists, did not send back any information.

For this reason, NASA's centre has been determining the potential cause of the failure since November. Scientists quickly established that the culprit was a chip responsible for storing part of the memory. With its help, or rather the code located there, the spacecraft could send clear messages.

Unfortunately, due to the distance of 25 billion kilometres from Earth, the repair options were not too vast. It was impossible to replace such a chip, so the only option the team working on the Voyagers had to decide upon was to relocate this function elsewhere. However, the enormous size was also problematic, which other memory carriers could not accommodate.

The NASA scientists were not discouraged, however. They developed a way to split the code in the damaged chip. This allowed the divided elements to be transferred to other memory carriers, restoring the machine's functionality. However, an update had to be sent to the spacecraft to accomplish all this, which took 48 hours to travel each way.