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  • NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft resumes sending data to Earth from interstellar space after 5-month outage

    Cheers and applause erupted this weekend when NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft sent back the first usable data from interstellar space after a five-month communication gap. Engineers with Voyager's flight team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, have been troubleshooting an issue since November, when the spacecraft, more than 15.1 billion miles from Earth, began sending back nonsense computer code. On Saturday, after 45 hours of waiting to find out if their plan to send the...

  • NASA re-establishes communication with Voyager 1 interstellar spacecraft that went silent for months

    NASA and Voyager 1 are communicating back and forth again, after the most distant human-made object in space stopped sending usable data back to the space agency nearly five months ago. NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Voyager 1, which is more than 15 billion miles away from Earth, stopped sending readable data back to scientists on Nov. 14, 2023, though mission controllers could still see the spacecraft was receiving commands and operating as intended. The Southern California-based...

  • After months of silence, Voyager 1 has returned NASA's calls

    For the last five months, it seemed very possible that a 46-year-old conversation had finally reached its end. Since its launch from Kennedy Space Center on Sept. 5, 1977, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has diligently sent regular updates to Earth on the health of its systems and data collected from its onboard instruments. But in November, the craft went quiet. Voyager 1 is now some 15 billion miles away from Earth. Somewhere in the cold interstellar space between our sun and the closest stars,...