NASA’s ancient Voyager 1 probe has fully restored contact with Earth

NASA reported that they were able to restore full communication with the Voyager 1 probe. Full communication was interrupted at the end of October, when the probe’s automation turned off the main transmitter. The auxiliary channel was so weak that it could only transmit and receive short commands, preventing the transmission of any scientific information. Now that’s behind us and the old man is back in business.

Image source: NASA

The Voyager 1 probe and its twin Voyager 2 have been in outer space for 47 years. Power on board is provided by three radioisotope thermoelectric generators each. The plutonium-238 contained in the blocks during the decay process releases heat, which is converted into electricity.

Every year, the power supplies on board the probes lose 4 W of power. As we flew between the planets, some of the scientific equipment was turned off due to unnecessary use. Now both probes are in interstellar space and keep four of the original eight instruments turned on. Scientific data is collected in the field of studying plasma and magnetic fields actually outside the solar heliosphere. During the experiments, it turned out that a number of devices can operate without mandatory heating, which also made it possible to save on the power of consumed on-board power.

In October, the NASA team sent a command to turn on the heating to Voyager 1, and after that the connection with the probe was interrupted. Reconstruction of the sequence of events showed that the probe’s automation detected excessive power consumption and began to turn off devices on board the device. In particular, the main X-band transmitter, which was the main communication channel between the Earth and the probe, was turned off. Instead, the automation turned on a weaker S-band transmitter, which was the first time it was turned on since 1981. Communication was restored at the level of command transmission, but not for the normal operation of scientific instruments (the probe does not accumulate data from sensors, but immediately transmits it, so the absence of a communication channel is tantamount to the cessation of scientific work).

After a series of experiments with manual power distribution across the Voyager 1 nodes, the NASA team was able to launch the X-band transmitter. This occurred on November 18th and was verified over the following week. All four scientific instruments of the probe began transmitting the collected data to Earth. NASA is confident that they have solved the problem. At least for a while. The probe equipment is so ancient that the very fact of its continued operation is surprising. But these are our only scouts in interstellar space. Voyager 1 collects information at a distance of 24.9 billion km from Earth. Even light takes about two days to fly to it and return back.