NASA's Voyager 1 Resumes Normal Operation After Data Transmission Resumption

TapTechNews June 16, NASA announced this week that Voyager 1, the farthest spacecraft made by humans, finally sent back data from all its four scientific instruments again, which means the agency can receive readings about plasma waves, magnetic fields and space particles again.

In November last year, Voyager 1 stopped sending valid data and the repair process was fraught with difficulties because engineers had to wait 45 hours after sending each instruction to get a response. In April this year, the spacecraft began to resend information about its health and status, and in May it resumed scientific data from two of its instruments.

Now, NASA says Voyager 1, which is more than 15 billion miles from the earth, is in a 'normal scientific operation' state, and the agency only needs to resynchronize its timing software and do some maintenance on a rarely used digital video tape recorder.

For a detector that has been running for nearly 47 years, this is already remarkable. According to TapTechNews, Voyager 1 was originally launched in 1977 to carry out a five-year flyby mission to study Jupiter and Saturn. Despite occasional problems, NASA still finds ways to extend the life of the probe, such as using reserve power or restarting a thruster that has not been used for nearly 30 years.