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Aging Voyager 1 sends back surprising response after ‘poke’ from Earth
Engineers have sent a “poke” to the Voyager 1 probe and received a potentially encouraging response as they hope to fix a communication issue with the aging spacecraft that has persisted for five months.
Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, are venturing through uncharted cosmic territory along the outer reaches of the solar system.
While Voyager 1 has continued to relay a steady radio signal to its mission control team on Earth, that signal has not carried any usable data since November, which has pointed to an issue with one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers.
A new signal recently received from the spacecraft suggests that the NASA mission team may be making progress in its quest to understand what Voyager 1 is experiencing. Voyager 1 is currently the farthest spacecraft from Earth at about 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away.