Voyager 1 transmitted readable data to Earth after five months of gobbledygook

NASA engineers received data on the state of the on-board systems of the automatic station.

Voyager 1 stopped sending understandable scientific and engineering data to Earth on November 14, 2023 - the radio signal arriving at Earth did not contain useful data. After an investigation in March 2024, mission engineers at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory determined that the problem was related to the operation of one of the station's onboard computers, the flight data subsystem (FDS), which packages data before sending it to Earth.

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Voyager 1 is located at a distance of more than 24 billion km from Earth. To overcome this enormous distance, a radio signal sent from our planet requires 22.5 hours to travel to the ship. Therefore, the operation to restore communication took almost three days: on April 18, engineers sent a team to fix it and only received a response on April 20.

Two identical stations, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, are the first spacecraft to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space. The stations, launched more than 46 years ago, continue to operate.