After a nail-biting 4 months, NASA has lastly obtained a understandable sign from its Voyager 1 spacecraft. Since November 2023, the almost-50-year-old spacecraft has been experiencing bother with its onboard computer systems. Though Voyager 1, considered one of NASA’s longest-lived area missions, has been sending a gentle radio sign to Earth, it hasn’t contained any usable information, which has perplexed scientists. Now, in response to a command immediate, or “poke,” despatched from Earth on March 1, NASA has obtained a brand new sign from Voyager 1 that engineers have been capable of decode. Mission scientists hope this data might assist them clarify the spacecraft’s latest communication issues. “The supply of the difficulty seems to be with considered one of three onboard computer systems, the flight information subsystem (FDS), which is chargeable for packaging the science and engineering information earlier than it is despatched to Earth by the telemetry modulation unit,” NASA mentioned in a weblog submit Wednesday (March 13).Associated: NASA’s 46-year-old Voyager 1 probe is now not transmitting dataOn March 1, as a part of efforts to discover a resolution to Voyager 1’s laptop points, NASA despatched a command to the FDS on the spacecraft, instructing it to make use of completely different sequences in its software program bundle, which might successfully imply skirting round any information that could be corrupted. Voyager 1 is greater than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth. This implies any radio alerts despatched from our planet take 22.5 hours to succeed in the spacecraft, with any response taking the identical time to be picked up by antennas on Earth. On March 3, NASA detected exercise from one part of the FDS that differed from the “unreadable information stream” they’d beforehand been receiving. 4 days later, engineers began the heavy job of making an attempt to decode this sign. By March 10, the workforce found that the sign contained a readout of all the FDS reminiscence. This included the directions for what the FDS wanted to do, any values in its code that may be modified relying on instructions from NASA or the spacecraft’s standing, and downloadable science or engineering information. Voyager 1 has ventured farther from Earth than some other human-made object. It was launched in 1977, inside weeks of its twin spacecraft, Voyager 2. The preliminary intention of the mission was to discover Jupiter and Saturn. But after virtually 5 many years, and with numerous discoveries underneath their belts, the mission continues past the boundaries of the photo voltaic system. NASA scientists will now “evaluate this readout to the one which got here down earlier than the difficulty arose and search for discrepancies within the code and the variables to probably discover the supply of the continued subject,” they mentioned within the weblog submit. Nevertheless, NASA burdened that it’ll take time to find out if any of the insights gained from this new sign can be utilized to unravel Voyager 1’s long-standing communication points.