Aging spacecraft starts up a radio transmitter it hasn’t used since 1981 from 15 billion miles away

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2024-11-02 10:00:22

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The 47-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft is back in touch with NASA — but not out of the woods — after a technical issue caused a days-long communications blackout with the historic mission, which is billions of miles away in interstellar space.

Voyager 1 is now using a radio transmitter it hasn’t relied on since 1981 to stay in contact with its team on Earth while engineers work to understand what went wrong.

As the spacecraft, launched in September 1977, ages, the team has slowly turned off components to conserve power, allowing Voyager 1 to send back unique science data from 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away.

The probe is the farthest spacecraft from Earth, operating beyond the heliosphere — the sun’s bubble of magnetic fields and particles that extends well beyond Pluto’s orbit — where its instruments directly sample interstellar space.