Voyager 1, the farthest human-made craft from the Earth, is finally sending back data from all four of its scientific instruments, NASA said last week. That means the agency is once more receiving its readings on plasma waves, magnetic fields, and space-bound particles.
As The Verge reports, Voyager 1 stopped sending back good data months ago, in November, and fixing it was fraught as engineers had to wait 45 hours to hear anything back. In April, the agency got it to start sending back health and status information, then science data from two of its instruments in May.
Now, NASA says Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles from Earth, is “conducting normal science operations” and the agency just needs to resync its timekeeping software and do some maintenance on a sparingly-used digital tape recorder.
That’s not bad for a probe that has continued to work for the better part of 47 years. Voyager 1 was originally launched in 1977 on a five-year fly-by mission to study Jupiter and Saturn. And despite occasional issues with it and Voyager 2, NASA keeps figuring out ways to squeeze more life out of the probes, like tapping into reserve power or firing up thrusters that hadn’t been used in nearly three decades.
If you’d like to show off your love for Voyager 1, NASA has super cool retro posters published on its site free to download.
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