Voyager 1 Successfully Resumes Communication With Earth Thanks to NASA’s Latest Rescue Efforts

Located 15.5 billion miles from Earth, the Voyager 1 space probe is back to normal operation after NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory temporarily lost communication with it in October.

Context. In mid-October, Voyager 1 automatically shut down its main radio transmitter. Its fail-safe system detected excessive power consumption after NASA sent a command to turn on one of the spacecraft’s heaters.

After triggering the fail-safe system, Voyager 1 ceased communication with Earth through its primary X-band transmitter. Instead, it began using an S-band transmitter that had been inactive for more than 40 years.

Why did it happen? The Voyager probes are designed to automatically shut down non-essential systems to conserve power when the fail-safe detects low available energy.

Currently, the probes have already turned off all but four scientific instruments. As a result, Voyager 1’s fail-safe system had no choice but to deactivate its X-band transmitter and switch to the less power-consuming S-band transmitter.

Rescue. The switch to a much weaker radio transmitter prevented the mission team from receiving science and probe status data until early November. Voyager 1 holds the record as the most distant spacecraft in history, and NASA was uncertain whether it could pick up its signals with the Deep Space Network antennas.

Despite these challenges, the team successfully established contact with the spacecraft and rebooted the system that synchronizes its three onboard computers. This allowed engineers to retrieve the science data feed and access the four still-operational instruments.

Old technology. The twin probes, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2, have been traveling through space for more than 47 years and are currently the only spacecraft operating in interstellar space. Their advanced age presents new challenges for the mission team, which must manage both aging technology and extremely limited power resources.

Both probes are powered by heat from the decaying plutonium in their thermoelectric generators, which causes them to lose around 4 watts of power each year. In 2019, NASA started shutting down non-critical systems to prolong their flight, including disabling the heaters on some scientific instruments.

To the team’s surprise, four of these instruments continue to function on each probe despite being exposed to temperatures lower than they were originally designed to withstand. These scientific instruments study the particles, plasma, and magnetic fields of interstellar space, the region between stars where the influence of the solar wind diminishes.

Image | NASA

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