NASA says Voyager 1 is fully back online months after it stopped making sense

Voyager 1, the farthest human-made craft from the Earth, is finally sending back data from all four of its scientific instruments, NASA said this week. That means the agency is once more receiving its readings on plasma waves, magnetic fields, and space-bound particles.

Voyager 1 stopped sending back good data in November, and fixing it was fraught as engineers had to wait 45 hours to hear anything back. In April, the agency got it to start sending back health and status information, then science data from two of its instruments in May.

Now, NASA says Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles from Earth, is “conducting normal science operations” and the agency just needs to resync its timekeeping software and do some maintenance on a…

Continue reading…