Voyager 1, Humanity's Farthest Satellite, Resumes Communication After Months of Silence

NASA has finally heard back from Voyager 1 again in a way that makes sense.The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data last November. It takes 22 hours and a half to send a signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles 24 billion kilometres away in interstellar space.

NASA has finally heard back from Voyager 1 again in a way that makes sense.

The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data last November. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft's coding to work around the trouble.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California declared success after receiving good engineering updates late last week. The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data. It takes 22 hours and a half to send a signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometres) away in interstellar space. The signal travel time is double that for a round trip.

Contact was never lost, rather it was like making a phone call where you cannot hear the person on the other end, a JPL spokeswoman said on Tuesday.

Launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 has been exploring interstellar space -- the space between star systems -- since 2012. Its twin, Voyager 2, is 12.6 billion miles (20 billion kilometres) away and still working fine.

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