Voyager-1 sends readable data again from deep space

From BBC

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Image source, NASA

By Jonathan AmosScience correspondent

The US space agency says its Voyager-1 probe is once again sending usable information back to Earth after months of spouting gibberish.

The 46-year-old Nasa spacecraft is humanity’s most distant object.

A computer fault stopped it returning readable data in November but engineers have now fixed this.

For the moment, Voyager is sending back only health data about its onboard systems, but further work should get the scientific instruments back online.

Voyager-1 is more than 24 billion km (15 billion miles) away, so distant, its radio messages take fully 22.5 hours to reach us.

“Voyager-1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems,” Nasa said in a statement.

“The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again.”

Voyager-1 was launched from Earth in 1977 on a tour of the outer planets, but then just kept going.

It moved beyond the bubble of gas emitted by the Sun – a domain known as the heliosphere – in 2012, and is now embedded in interstellar space, which contains the gas, dust and magnetic fields from other stars.

Voyager-1 departs to interstellar space Voyager-1: Through the door to eternity The maths that made Voyager possible

A corrupted chip has been blamed for the ageing spacecraft’s recent woes.

This prevented Voyager’s computers from accessing a vital segment of software code used to package information for transmission to Earth.

For a period of time, engineers could