NASA’s Voyager-1 spacecraft responded after 5 months, sent message from 24 billion miles away – News India Live

NASA’s Voyager-1, sent into space in 1977, has achieved great success by sending a message after 5 months. Voyager 1, launched 47 years ago, is orbiting outside the solar system at a distance of 24 billion km from Earth. For the last few months, NASA’s Voyager-1 spacecraft has been losing contact. The mission was sending strange data to the control room that indicated it was out of date.

For the last 5 months there was no indication that the expiry date was approaching. Especially after the month of November, Voyager-1 flight data system was stuck in loop. The data being sent from billions of kilometers away was of no particular use. According to NASA report, Voyager-1 last sent a message on November 14. Voyager-1 got a lease of life from a sudden signal.

The detection of the signal proves that Voyager-1’s life is still left. Voyager-1, called the Flight Subsystem (FDS), prepares science and engineering data before transmitting it to Earth. An engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California realized that the part of the FDS memory responsible for storage had a chip that was not working. The chip also contained FDS computer software code.

After a failed attempt to repair the chip, the mission control team decided to store the code in another location in the FDS memory, but found no location where the code could be stored. Then a plan was made to divide the mission control code into several parts and keep them at different places. On April 18, a radio signal was sent to Voyager-1. After some modifications to the code, the control team received a message from the spacecraft on April 20.