Voyager 1 is back! Legendary probe makes contact from interstellar space

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A gentle voice we have longed for drifts back to us from interstellar space, 15 billion miles away.

Voyager 1 – the most distant man-made object on Earth – sounds like itself again on the deep space radio network after six months of gibberish.

Scientists at NASA are thrilled.

“We’re back, baby!” reads an X-post from NASA on June 15.

“Our Voyager 1 spacecraft is conducting normal science operations for the first time since November 2023. All four instruments – which study plasma waves, magnetic fields and particles – return useful scientific data.”

It’s the first time in many months that the 46-year-old probe has been able to share everything it’s doing in the near-icy frontier of our solar system, outside the influence of our sun.

In November 2023, Voyager 1 suddenly started sending back random data that made no sense to scientists.

The problem appeared to stem from a small, damaged chip in the probe’s onboard memory system, possibly caused by age, or perhaps caused by energetic particles in interstellar space.

Because the technology on board Voyager 1 is so outdated, engineers at NASA had to consult manuals from the 1970s to work around the problem.

On May 19, the NASA team managed to get two of the four science instruments aboard Voyager 1 to send readable data back to Earth.

“Kind of like when your power goes out and you have to go through the house to reset all your electronics… That’s basically what my team and I are doing right now,” according to an official account for Voyager 1 on X.

Now all four scientific instruments on board the deep space probe can once again return useful data to our planet.

Voyager 1 and its brother, Voyager 2, are exploring a region of space that has never before been directly encountered by a human-made object, so missing data is quite a letdown.

These probes are the only way scientists can directly study the interstellar medium, and their measurements have already revealed important details about how our solar system formed and how far the ‘solar bubble’ extends.

Distance of Voyagers from the limits of the Sun’s influence. (NASA/JPL-Caltech)

Although the Voyager spacecraft are often said to have “left our solar system,” they have only left the heliopause and have yet to reach the supposed Oort cloud, which is believed to be the outermost zone of our gravitationally bound system.

Unfortunately, both Voyagers will never reach the icy edge in working condition, as their onboard generators continue to steadily lose power. Experts at NASA predict that at current speeds it will take three centuries for Voyager 1 to reach the Oort Cloud. It would take another 30,000 years to reach the other side of the cloud.

Engineers predict that Voyager 1 will have at least one more instrument by 2025, and that it could continue talking over NASA’s Deep Space Network until 2036. It all depends on how much power the probe has left by then.

The Voyager 1 has shown signs of aging in recent years. Aside from this most recent event, a broken onboard computer began corrupting outgoing messages in 2022. The problem was eventually resolved, but it took several days. Even if the probe travels at the speed of light, it will take about 22.5 hours for radio messages from the probe to return to Earth.

Voyager's distance
The distance of Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 from our sun. (NASA)

A team at NASA is now working to maintain Voyager 1’s digital tape recorder. This memory system records 48 seconds of high-speed data from the onboard plasma wave instrument just three times a week.

This means that when Voyager 1 loses its ability to communicate properly, all its other information is lost.

Who knows what we’ve missed in the past six months?

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