NASA confirmed that it had received a signal from its spacecraft Voyager 1 located outside our solar system

Sent into space 46 years ago, Voyager 1 had not sent usable data since November 2023. A few days ago, NASA confirmed on Twitter that it had received a signal from its spacecraft Voyager 1 located outside our solar system, more than 24 billion kilometers from Earth.

Launched into space in 1977 to explore interstellar space, Voyager 1 had stopped sending exploitable messages to NASA since November 2023. Instead, sequences of numbers composed of 0s and 1s, apparently due to an undecipherable computer bug for engineers, were sent until now.

Voyager 1 was the first object made by humans to venture into interstellar space. During its journey, the spacecraft enabled several unprecedented observations, such as the discovery of the rings of Saturn and Jupiter, and new moons.

However, after 46 years in space, Voyager 1 had stopped emitting intelligible information to NASA, suggesting that its mission might end there. After months of indecipherable binary chatter, researchers decided to send what they called "a poke" to Voyager 1 on March 1st to encourage it to try different sequences in its software.

"Voyager 1 being more than 24 billion kilometers from Earth, it takes 22.5 hours for a radio signal to reach the spacecraft and an additional 22.5 hours for the probe's response to reach the ground antennas," NASA explained in a statement.

The ground team received the signal results on March 3rd and began working on decoding the data starting from March 7th.

"This is the most serious problem we have encountered since I became project manager," said Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager 1.

If the new signal sent by Voyager 1 was still not in the format used when it was functioning correctly, engineers nevertheless managed to decipher part of the code, potentially allowing them to find a solution to Voyager 1's transmission problem.

"These are incredibly important and highly valued spacecraft," said Nicola Fox, NASA's associate administrator for science at Scientific American.

Its twin, Voyager 2, still in interstellar space, is the only spacecraft to study closely the four giant planets of the solar system. In July 2023, communication with the spacecraft also encountered technical problems before being restored.