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Fearless in Love

V [2023 Reissue]

Promise (House Remix)

Promise - Producer Pack

Promise/Dreamer

A Voyage Through Time

Voyager - 'Dreamer' Remix and Creator Pack

Colours in the Sun

The Meaning of I

I am the reVolution

Voyager Perth, Australia

Get ready to witness a genre-transfiguring quintet take the stage like never before! Hailing from Australia, Voyager has shattered expectations with their resilient and determined attitude. The new album 'Fearless in Love' is next-level prog metal mastery that shatters all archetypes and expectations. Available NOW! ...   more

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Who are Voyager, the band representing Australia at this year's Eurovision?

The synth-metal group will represent australia at the 67th eurovision song contest in liverpool with their song promise..

Perth-based synth-metal band Voyager will represent Australia at the 2023 Eurovision Song Contest. Source: Supplied / Michael Dann

• SBS has announced Perth-based synth-metal group Voyager as Australia's 2023 Eurovision Song Contest pick.
• It's the first time a band will represent Australia at the contest, to be held in Liverpool in the United Kingdom.
• The contest will be held from 9 -13 May.

'Dream come true': Australia's Sheldon Riley through to Eurovision grand final

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Who are metal band Voyager? Australia’s Eurovision entry set to rock the contest

Australia has a short but impactful history in Eurovision , and its 2023 entry looks set to be among its most memorable.

Metal band Voyager have been trying to get a place on the show since before Australia was even competing, so when Europe was extended to a land down under for the show in 2015, they were keen to join the fun.

Bass player Alex Cainon told the NME : “The most common feedback we get is that we look like we’re having fun onstage – which we’ve found, over the years, translates into the crowd themselves having fun. And that’s exactly what Eurovision is about, you know?”

Voyager formed in 1999 in the Western Australian city of Perth - a place other Aussies will tell you is in “woop woop” (a million miles from anywhere). And perhaps as geographical outsiders they have had what it takes to form a cult following which has seen them release eight albums - most recently Fearless in Love this year.

There is a huge Eurovision following in Australia and the country was set to compete only once in 2015 to mark the 50th anniversary, but has returned every year since - although it has yet to win. While it is not unheard of for a metal band to win the competition (remember Lordi in 2006?) Voyager are considered outsiders for this year’s competition which begins, for them, on Thursday, May 11 with the second semi-final.

But winning is not everything and the band are instead hoping to put Australian metal onto the global stage.

“Eurovision is the kind of thing you can do and come out of with a completely new fanbase,” guitarist Scott Kay told NME .

“If they’re into more obscure types of music, hopefully they’ll see us and then check out all the other amazing talent we have in Australia.”

Voyager will enter the 2023 competition with their song Promise which they hope will provide a solid entry point for fans. The band have crossed the boundary and are now in the host city of Liverpool hoping to make the final which will be on Saturday.

To find out more about Eurovision 2023 click here .

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NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth

NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is depicted in this artist’s concept traveling through interstellar space, or the space between stars, which it entered in 2012.

After some inventive sleuthing, the mission team can — for the first time in five months — check the health and status of the most distant human-made object in existence.

For the first time since November , NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems. The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. The probe and its twin, Voyager 2, are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars).

Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth on Nov. 14, 2023, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally. In March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed that the issue was tied to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS). The FDS is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth.

After receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in five months, members of the Voyager flight team celebrate in a conference room at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory on April 20.

The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.

So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.

The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth. When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft.

Get the Latest News from the Final Frontier

During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data.

Voyager 2 continues to operate normally. Launched over 46 years ago , the twin Voyager spacecraft are the longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history. Before the start of their interstellar exploration, both probes flew by Saturn and Jupiter, and Voyager 2 flew by Uranus and Neptune.

Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for NASA.

News Media Contact

Calla Cofield

Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, Calif.

626-808-2469

[email protected]

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NASA hears from Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, after months of quiet

This illustration provided by NASA depicts Voyager 1. The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data in November 2023. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft’s coding to work around the trouble. In mid-April 2024, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory declared success after receiving good engineering updates. The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data. (NASA via AP)

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — 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 1/2 hours to send a signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) 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 can’t hear the person on the other end, a JPL spokeswoman said 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 kilometers) away and still working fine.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

Navy veteran and survivor Brian Hopkins revisits HMAS Voyager collision, considers legacy and value of service

In 1964, Brian Hopkins survived Australia's deadliest peacetime maritime disaster, being one of the last to escape the sinking HMAS Voyager II. Now, more than 60 years later, the navy veteran revisits his past.

As Brian Hopkins walks below the deck of the retired warship HMAS Vampire for perhaps the final time, there are vivid memories at every turn.

"It's like being at home. It doesn't matter what ship you're on," he said.

"A ship is like a living being when it's operational. It's got a pulse."

Mr Hopkins, one of Australia's almost 500,000 former serving veterans, looks back fondly at his 20 years of service in the Australian navy.

That sense of pride extends to his first years, including the time spent as an engineer on the now-infamous HMAS Voyager II, a ship virtually identical to its sister ship Vampire.

The 79-year-old can still remember the intricate details of Voyager, like how the blue pipes that ran overhead were purposed for drinking water, or the sounds that would come out of the gun bay.

"This place used to moan and groan because it was operated by hydraulics," he said.

Above deck, Mr Hopkins explained the difference between a one deck and a front deck, the name of each turret and its function, and   the exact spot where HMAS Melbourne II collided with the destroyer causing catastrophic disaster.

"Back in 1964, just forward of where we are now, is where Melbourne sliced Voyager in half."

In 1964, Voyager was struck by the almost 20,000-tonne aircraft carrier off the coast of Jervis Bay during a training exercise.

Of the 314 people on board, 82 perished, making it the largest loss of military personnel during peacetime in Australian history.

Mr Hopkins was on board Voyager at the time of the collision.

He was one of the last two survivors to make it off the ship.

His first time stepping onboard Vampire was one week after the collision for a burial at sea.

"I've been to sea on the Vampire," Mr Hopkins said. "Only for a day." 

While it's been more than a decade   since he stood on a naval ship, and 42 years since he ended his service, Mr Hopkins, now living with terminal cancer, still has pride in the time he served.

"Once navy, always navy," he said. 

"The saltwater stays with you, no matter where you are."

'Possibly in my DNA'

As the son of both a veteran and someone who worked with water, Mr Hopkins said joining the navy was likely out of his control.

"It was something that I think was possibly in my DNA," he said.

As a boy, Mr Hopkins' father, who served for over five years during World War II, worked on the crew of Sydney Ferries and on the Eucambene Dam project.

"Watching the [Snowy River] waters rise, it sort of lured me I guess, as a youngster growing up."

Mr Hopkins enlisted when he was 17 years old in 1962. Soon he was aboard Voyager, serving as an engineer. He remembers the camaraderie between the crew, particularly among the engineers.

"We'd play sports quite often, especially in harbour," he said.

He can also remember his fondest memory, docking in the Japanese city of Karatsu.

"We were the first warship to go there in four years, and the first Australian warship to go there since World War II."

"There was a high school band that welcomed us. And when we left, we were like a cruise ship."

But after 13 months on board, the destroyer collided with Melbourne on the night of February 10, just before 9pm.

Following the collision, the forward section of the Voyager broke off and sank within 10 minutes.

The aft section initially remained afloat but, slowly, it began sinking into the sea, being submerged after midnight.

At the time, the 19-year-old Mr Hopkins was in the aft section, showering after a shift.

"I had a midshipman, Kerry Marien, double up with me. He was aspiring to be a naval engineer," he said.

"He went to have dinner in the boardroom and gave me a ring down the mess to say that the wardroom dinner was running late and that he'd give me a buzz when they'd finished, and we'd go trace out the feedwater system in a boiler room."

A loud bang led Mr Hopkins, with soap in his hair, to open the shower door, where he saw Voyager was hard up against the aircraft carrier.

Instinctively, he grabbed his clothes — a pair of work overalls — and sped towards an escape hatch.

"Buck Rogers — Jonathan Rogers — he was physically too large to fit through the escape hatch, and he was physically tossing guys through the escape hatch to escape," Mr Hopkins can remember.

"Being a Welshman, great voice, he was leading the guys that were trapped in [the] hymn — Abide With Me — as the forward section went under."

Mr Hopkins was one of the last two men to make it off Voyager, with the then-teenager removing his overalls to avoid sinking in the saltwater, swimming naked to a life raft.

"No-one has a 100 per cent idea of what happened that night because all those that do know perished on that night," he said.

"But it appears that [the cause] may have been a lack of situational awareness by the officers of the watch as to where Voyager was and where the carrier was."

Since the collision, two royal commissions were held in the 1960s to identify the cause.

Neither came to certain conclusions, but both were critical of the man at the helm of the Voyager, Captain Duncan Stevens, and his capacity to lead the ship.

There has also since been criticism of the lack of mental support by the navy for the survivors, including how there was no counselling but  simply a week off .

"The mentality of the time, from the naval hierarchy's viewpoint, was 'You fell off the horse, get back on sort-of thing'," Mr Hopkins said.

Mr Hopkins would continue to serve in the navy, shortly after being posted to an anti-submarine frigate, followed by a stint in the Vietnam War.

He remembers how one of his classmates, a "good bloke", died during the Vietnam War.

"He'd only just recently got married. He didn't want to get married at all."

In 1982, he completed his service, leaving as a chief petty officer in marine technician propulsion.

'Where destiny falls'

Despite the collision being more than 60 years ago, Mr Hopkins remembers plenty about it.

He can remember how some of the crew were playing tombola at the time.

He can recall the crew who relieved him that night, including Diepenbroek, his times on the watch with Macartney, and how he spent a weekend convincing Curgenven not to go AWOL.

"We spent all weekend talking him around to come back to the ship," Mr Hopkins recollected.

"They're guys that perished that night."

In the 30 years that followed, Mr Hopkins struggled. First, he brushed off any idea of any emotional or mental impacts.

"But unbeknownst to me, survivor's guilt started to rear its ugly head. I felt guilty of surviving the collision."

"Like many people, I took solace in the bottle. Probably drank more than I should have."

Mr Hopkins found he struggled to open up about the experience for 30 years, eventually finding support from both a therapist and his wife.

"It was something that I did take quite a while to come to terms with, and it's quite ironic given that the Voyager's motto is 'Quo Fata Vocant'. It means 'Where destiny falls'."

These days, Mr Hopkins tries not to reflect on it.

"It is what it is that happened," he said.

"Life goes on. And so do I."

'It's here for a reason'

Mr Hopkins's eventual peace with the night of the collision is clear by his feelings aboard the Vampire.

He says he doesn't believe he's experiencing any negative feelings being on the Vampire.

"In fact, I'm proud to be here, because I'm here with my family."

On board, he's surrounded by his family, including his daughter, granddaughter and 14-year-old great-granddaughter Juliet.

Equally, Mr Hopkins has accepted his cancer diagnosis.

In June 2023, he was diagnosed with mesothelioma, an aggressive form of cancer, in his lungs.

From July to October, he underwent immunotherapy, followed by chemotherapy until January this year.

"When we started chemo, the [objective] was to hopefully survive until February to be able to attend the 60th anniversary [of the Voyager Collision]. I've managed to do that."

Mr Hopkins has no plan for further treatments, instead focusing on one day at a time.

The long-term goal is to make it to January 18 next year for his 80th birthday.

"But if I don't make it that far, so be it."

Looking forward, he has ideas of what he wants his legacy to be.

"My legacy, I hope, is that, through my life, they will understand that we can have trials and tribulations. But also, to remember those that went before us."

"I'd just like to convey that, not only do we remember those who served and paid the supreme sacrifice … we remember those that didn't see active service as such, but paid us the supreme sacrifice."

Speaking in between tears, Juliet came to a similar definition.

"Remembering what came before you. Just acknowledging the past. Acknowledging the way people were there," she said.

"It's here for a reason."

Reporting: Nabil Al-Nashar  and Sam Nichols

Digital production:  Sam Nichols

Photography: Brendan Esposito

Videography: Marcus Stimson

Video editing: Sebastian Dixon

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NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft finally phones home after 5 months of no contact

On Saturday, April 5, Voyager 1 finally "phoned home" and updated its NASA operating team about its health.

NASA's interstellar explorer Voyager 1 is finally communicating with ground control in an understandable way again. On Saturday (April 20), Voyager 1 updated ground control about its health status for the first time in 5 months. While the Voyager 1 spacecraft still isn't sending valid science data back to Earth, it is now returning usable information about the health and operating status of its onboard engineering systems. 

Thirty-five years after its launch in 1977, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space . It was followed out of our cosmic quarters by its space-faring sibling, Voyager 2 , six years later in 2018. Voyager 2, thankfully, is still operational and communicating well with Earth. 

The two spacecraft remain the only human-made objects exploring space beyond the influence of the sun. However, on Nov. 14, 2023, after 11 years of exploring interstellar space and while sitting a staggering 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, Voyager 1's binary code — computer language composed of 0s and 1s that it uses to communicate with its flight team at NASA — stopped making sense.

Related: We finally know why NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft stopped communicating — scientists are working on a fix

In March, NASA's Voyager 1 operating team sent a digital "poke" to the spacecraft, prompting its flight data subsystem (FDS) to send a full memory readout back home.

This memory dump revealed to scientists and engineers that the "glitch" is the result of a corrupted code contained on a single chip representing around 3% of the FDS memory. The loss of this code rendered Voyager 1's science and engineering data unusable.

The NASA team can't physically repair or replace this chip, of course, but what they can do is remotely place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. Though no single section of the memory is large enough to hold this code entirely, the team can slice it into sections and store these chunks separately. To do this, they will also have to adjust the relevant storage sections to ensure the addition of this corrupted code won't cause those areas to stop operating individually, or working together as a whole. In addition to this, NASA staff will also have to ensure any references to the corrupted code's location are updated.

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On April 18, 2024, the team began sending the code to its new location in the FDS memory. This was a painstaking process, as a radio signal takes 22.5 hours to traverse the distance between Earth and Voyager 1, and it then takes another 22.5 hours to get a signal back from the craft. 

By Saturday (April 20), however, the team confirmed their modification had worked. For the first time in five months, the scientists were able to communicate with Voyager 1 and check its health. Over the next few weeks, the team will work on adjusting the rest of the FDS software and aim to recover the regions of the system that are responsible for packaging and returning vital science data from beyond the limits of the solar system.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.’s Open University. Follow him on Twitter @sciencef1rst.

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• Robb62 'V'ger must contact the creator. Reply
• Holy HannaH! Couldn't help but think that "repair" sounded extremely similar to the mechanics of DNA and the evolution of life. Reply
• Torbjorn Larsson *Applause* indeed, thanks to the Voyager teams for the hard work! Reply
• SpaceSpinner I notice that the article says that it has been in space for 35 years. Either I have gone back in time 10 years, or their AI is off by 10 years. V-*ger has been captured! Reply

Admin said: On Saturday, April 5, Voyager 1 finally "phoned home" and updated its NASA operating team about its health. The interstellar explorer is back in touch after five months of sending back nonsense data. NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft finally phones home after 5 months of no contact : Read more

evw said: I'm incredibly grateful for the persistence and dedication of the Voyagers' teams and for the amazing accomplishments that have kept these two spacecrafts operational so many years beyond their expected lifetimes. V-1 was launched when I was 25 years young; I was nearly delirious with joy. Exploring the physical universe captivated my attention while I was in elementary school and has kept me mesmerized since. I'm very emotional writing this note, thinking about what amounts to a miracle of technology and longevity in my eyes. BRAVO!!! THANK YOU EVERYONE PAST & PRESENT!!!

• EBairead I presume it's Fortran. Well done all. Reply

SpaceSpinner said: I notice that the article says that it has been in space for 35 years. Either I have gone back in time 10 years, or their AI is off by 10 years. V-*ger has been captured!

EBairead said: I presume it's Fortran. Well done all.

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Well, hello, Voyager 1! The venerable spacecraft is once again making sense

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Members of the Voyager team celebrate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory after receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in months. NASA/JPL-Caltech hide caption

Members of the Voyager team celebrate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory after receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in months.

NASA says it is once again able to get meaningful information back from the Voyager 1 probe, after months of troubleshooting a glitch that had this venerable spacecraft sending home messages that made no sense.

The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes launched in 1977 on a mission to study Jupiter and Saturn but continued onward through the outer reaches of the solar system. In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space, the previously unexplored region between the stars. (Its twin, traveling in a different direction, followed suit six years later.)

Voyager 1 had been faithfully sending back readings about this mysterious new environment for years — until November, when its messages suddenly became incoherent .

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is talking nonsense. Its friends on Earth are worried

It was a serious problem that had longtime Voyager scientists worried that this historic space mission wouldn't be able to recover. They'd hoped to be able to get precious readings from the spacecraft for at least a few more years, until its power ran out and its very last science instrument quit working.

For the last five months, a small team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California has been working to fix it. The team finally pinpointed the problem to a memory chip and figured out how to restore some essential software code.

"When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft," NASA stated in an update.

The usable data being returned so far concerns the workings of the spacecraft's engineering systems. In the coming weeks, the team will do more of this software repair work so that Voyager 1 will also be able to send science data, letting researchers once again see what the probe encounters as it journeys through interstellar space.

After a 12.3 billion-mile 'shout,' NASA regains full contact with Voyager 2

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After months of silence, Voyager 1 has returned NASA’s calls

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For the last five months, it seemed very possible that a 46-year-old conversation had finally reached its end.

Since its launch from Kennedy Space Center on Sept. 5, 1977, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has diligently sent regular updates to Earth on the health of its systems and data collected from its onboard instruments.

But in November, the craft went quiet.

Voyager 1 is now some 15 billion miles away from Earth. Somewhere in the cold interstellar space between our sun and the closest stars, its flight data system stopped communicating with the part of the probe that allows it to send signals back to Earth. Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge could tell that Voyager 1 was getting its messages, but nothing was coming back.

“We’re to the point where the hardware is starting to age,” said Linda Spilker, the project scientist for the Voyager mission. “It’s like working on an antique car, from 15 billion miles away.”

Week after week, engineers sent troubleshooting commands to the spacecraft, each time patiently waiting the 45 hours it takes to get a response here on Earth — 22.5 hours traveling at the speed of light to reach the probe, and 22.5 hours back.

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By March, the team had figured out that a memory chip that stored some of the flight data system’s software code had failed, turning the craft’s outgoing communications into gibberish.

A long-distance repair wasn’t possible. There wasn’t enough space anywhere in the system to shift the code in its entirety. So after manually reviewing the code line by line, engineers broke it up and tucked the pieces into the available slots of memory.

They sent a command to Voyager on Thursday. In the early morning hours Saturday, the team gathered around a conference table at JPL: laptops open, coffee and boxes of doughnuts in reach.

At 6:41 a.m., data from the craft showed up on their screens. The fix had worked .

“We went from very quiet and just waiting patiently to cheers and high-fives and big smiles and sighs of relief,” Spilker said. “I’m very happy to once again have a meaningful conversation with Voyager 1.”

Voyager 1 is one of two identical space probes. Voyager 2, launched two weeks before Voyager 1, is now about 13 billion miles from Earth, the two crafts’ trajectories having diverged somewhere around Saturn. (Voyager 2 continued its weekly communications uninterrupted during Voyager 1’s outage.)

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They are the farthest-flung human-made objects in the universe, having traveled farther from their home planet than anything else this species has built. The task of keeping communications going grows harder with each passing day. Every 24 hours, Voyager 1 travels 912,000 miles farther away from us. As that distance grows, the signal becomes slower and weaker.

When the probe visited Jupiter in 1979, it was sending back data at a rate of 115.2 kilobits per second, Spilker said. Today, 45 years and more than 14 billion miles later, data come back at a rate of 40 bits per second.

The team is cautiously optimistic that the probes will stay in contact for three more years, long enough to celebrate the mission’s 50th anniversary in 2027, Spilker said. They could conceivably last until the 2030s.

The conversation can’t last forever. Microscopic bits of silica keep clogging up the thrusters that keep the probes’ antennas pointed toward Earth, which could end communications. The power is running low. Eventually, the day will come when both Voyagers stop transmitting data to Earth, and the first part of their mission ends.

But on the day each craft goes quiet, they begin a new era, one that could potentially last far longer. Each probe is equipped with a metallic album cover containing a Golden Record , a gold-plated copper disk inscribed with sounds and images meant to describe the species that built the Voyagers and the planet they came from.

Erosion in space is negligible; the images could be readable for another billion years or more. Should any other intelligent life form encounter one of the Voyager probes and have a means of retrieving the data from the record, they will at the very least have a chance to figure out who sent them — even if our species is by that time long gone.

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Corinne Purtill is a science and medicine reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Her writing on science and human behavior has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Time Magazine, the BBC, Quartz and elsewhere. Before joining The Times, she worked as the senior London correspondent for GlobalPost (now PRI) and as a reporter and assignment editor at the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh. She is a native of Southern California and a graduate of Stanford University.

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Voyager 1 transmitting data again after Nasa remotely fixes 46-year-old probe

Engineers spent months working to repair link with Earth’s most distant spacecraft, says space agency

Earth’s most distant spacecraft, Voyager 1, has started communicating properly again with Nasa after engineers worked for months to remotely fix the 46-year-old probe.

Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), which makes and operates the agency’s robotic spacecraft, said in December that the probe – more than 15bn miles (24bn kilometres) away – was sending gibberish code back to Earth.

In an update released on Monday , JPL announced the mission team had managed “after some inventive sleuthing” to receive usable data about the health and status of Voyager 1’s engineering systems. “The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again,” JPL said. Despite the fault, Voyager 1 had operated normally throughout, it added.

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was designed with the primary goal of conducting close-up studies of Jupiter and Saturn in a five-year mission. However, its journey continued and the spacecraft is now approaching a half-century in operation.

Voyager 1 crossed into interstellar space in August 2012, making it the first human-made object to venture out of the solar system. It is currently travelling at 37,800mph (60,821km/h).

Hi, it's me. - V1 https://t.co/jgGFBfxIOe — NASA Voyager (@NASAVoyager) April 22, 2024

The recent problem was related to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, which are responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it is sent to Earth. Unable to repair a broken chip, the JPL team decided to move the corrupted code elsewhere, a tricky job considering the old technology.

The computers on Voyager 1 and its sister probe, Voyager 2, have less than 70 kilobytes of memory in total – the equivalent of a low-resolution computer image. They use old-fashioned digital tape to record data.

The fix was transmitted from Earth on 18 April but it took two days to assess if it had been successful as a radio signal takes about 22 and a half hours to reach Voyager 1 and another 22 and a half hours for a response to come back to Earth. “When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on 20 April, they saw that the modification worked,” JPL said.

Alongside its announcement, JPL posted a photo of members of the Voyager flight team cheering and clapping in a conference room after receiving usable data again, with laptops, notebooks and doughnuts on the table in front of them.

The Retired Canadian astronaut Chris Hadfield, who flew two space shuttle missions and acted as commander of the International Space Station, compared the JPL mission to long-distance maintenance on a vintage car.

“Imagine a computer chip fails in your 1977 vehicle. Now imagine it’s in interstellar space, 15bn miles away,” Hadfield wrote on X . “Nasa’s Voyager probe just got fixed by this team of brilliant software mechanics.

Voyager 1 and 2 have made numerous scientific discoveries , including taking detailed recordings of Saturn and revealing that Jupiter also has rings, as well as active volcanism on one of its moons, Io. The probes later discovered 23 new moons around the outer planets.

As their trajectory takes them so far from the sun, the Voyager probes are unable to use solar panels, instead converting the heat produced from the natural radioactive decay of plutonium into electricity to power the spacecraft’s systems.

Nasa hopes to continue to collect data from the two Voyager spacecraft for several more years but engineers expect the probes will be too far out of range to communicate in about a decade, depending on how much power they can generate. Voyager 2 is slightly behind its twin and is moving slightly slower.

In roughly 40,000 years, the probes will pass relatively close, in astronomical terms, to two stars. Voyager 1 will come within 1.7 light years of a star in the constellation Ursa Minor, while Voyager 2 will come within a similar distance of a star called Ross 248 in the constellation of Andromeda.

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