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Rise of the ABBA-tars! Inside ABBA’s Groundbreaking Live Residency

By Brittany Spanos

Brittany Spanos

After they broke up four decades ago, ABBA famously refused all kinds of money for reunion ABBA-tars and performances. But a few years ago, British entrepreneur Simon Fuller pitched an idea that piqued the Swedish superstars’ interest. “We got sort of turned on by the thought that we could actually be onstage without us being there,” ABBA singer-songwriter Benny Andersson says over Zoom.

The band, along with Fuller and their producers Ludvig Andersson (Benny Andersson’s son) and Svana Gisla (music-video producer for the likes of Radiohead and Beyoncé), initially explored reproducing themselves by hologram technology, but that didn’t pan out. ABBA finally realized a grander dream: ABBA Voyage, the concert residency at newly built ABBA Arena in London’s Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park that begins May 27.

Made with help from George Lucas’ Industrial Light & Magic, digital avatars (also known as ABBA-tars) embody the stars in their Seventies prime, performing a 22-song set alongside a flesh-and-blood backing band assembled by James Righton of the Klaxons and including U.K. singer Little Boots on keys. “It’s been a lot of uphill,” the elder Andersson says. “Brexit, the pandemic. It’s been a lot of stuff that hasn’t worked well, but we’ve been resilient.”

The band and the team and ILM realized early on that an existing venue wasn’t going to work for the residency. There are 1,000 visual-effects artists on ABBA Voyage, making it the biggest project ILM has done, according to Gisla (and this is the company behind Star Wars, Marvel, and Jurassic Park ). The roof of ABBA Arena was reengineered three times to fit the complicated lighting system. Where many concerts might use only one lighting rig, this one uses 20.

There was a lot of work put into making the ABBA-tars — which, the band stresses, are not holograms, but digital versions of the members that look like real, physical performers. Not too long before the pandemic put things to a near-halt, the four members of ABBA met from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. each day, for four and half weeks straight, performing for 200 cameras and a crew of nearly 40 people while wearing motion-capture suits. They posted up in a sound studio within the Swedish Film Institute, playing all the songs they had carefully curated for their first show in 40 years. “It was really a pleasure for all of us,” Andersson says.

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Back in London, body doubles emulated the performances, but with a younger energy. “We are sort of merged together with our body doubles. Don’t ask me how it works because I can’t explain that,” Andersson continues. “If you’re 75, you don’t jump around like you did when you were 34, so this is why this happened.”

“ABBA are onstage there physically, and we can say that with quite some degree of certainty because we are in rehearsals right now,” Gisla says. Andersson was impressed when he watched himself and the others “perform” for the first time in April: “I see myself standing onstage, talking to you. It’s absolutely believable. It’s not unbelievable. It’s believable!”

During rehearsals, Andersson and bandmate Björn Ulvaeus were hit with a spark of creativity. They penned two new songs — “I Still Have Faith in You” and “Don’t Shut Me Down” — and asked Agnetha Fältskog and Anni-Frid Lyngstad if they’d record them for the show. “We recorded those two and found that we’re still good enough,” Andersson says. Eventually, they recorded a whole album, last year’s Voyage. “I Still Have Faith in You” was so well-regarded that it garnered the group its first Grammy nomination ever.

There’s still much about the future of the production that ABBA and ILM still don’t know. They could end up touring years from now, or even change the set list. One thing’s for sure: Gisla and Ludvig Andersson have no plans to do anything like this again, and they point out that nothing like this should probably exist again in the future. As impressive as the tech is, they worry about how it could be used. “I personally don’t think that doing things posthumously with artists that are passed away, where they have no hand or opinion or say in the matter, is a good idea,” Gisla explains. “ABBA made this show, but had they not been involved, it wouldn’t be an ABBA concert.”

Ludvig Andersson adds: “We hear often, ‘This is the dawn of a new era in live entertainment.’ I think that’s an incorrect statement. I don’t think it is. This is unique.”

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The London location was a no-brainer for the group, which is still based in Sweden. Not only is London a major destination for international travel, it’s also the place where the often-maligned group felt most at home when away from home. “The English people have always treated ABBA like we were their own, for some weird reason,” Andersson says. “They’ve taken ABBA to their hearts and they show us that.” In some ways, ABBA’s return is perfectly timed. Many millennials were exposed to the group through the tribute pop band A*Teens at the turn of the century, and later, the musical Mamma Mia! and its cult-classic film adaptation (as well as the original sequel Mamma Mia! Here We Go Again) . For both millennials and Gen Z kids, the group is a musical fixture on the level of what the Beatles were for Gen X. There are ABBA-themed parties at venues across the globe, and songs like “Dancing Queen” and “Chiquitita” have become hits on TikTok. Andersson still doesn’t understand. “That’s pretty weird, isn’t it? It’s 40 years ago, and the corpse is still moving. I don’t know. Maybe it’s good enough. Maybe that’s the only answer.”

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ABBA Voyage

It’s been a while since we made music together. Almost 40 years, actually. We took a break in the spring of 1982 and now we’ve decided it’s time to end it. They say it’s foolhardy to wait more than 40 years between albums, so we’ve recorded a follow-up to “The Visitors”. To tell the truth, the main inspiration to record again comes from our involvement in creating the strangest and most spectacular concert you could ever dream of. We’re going to be able to sit back in an audience and watch our digital selves perform our songs on a stage in a custom-built arena in London next spring. Weird and wonderful!

To all of you who patiently have followed us in some way or another these past decades:

Thank you for waiting – it’s time for a new journey to begin.

“We simply call it “Voyage” and we’re truly sailing in uncharted waters. With the help of our younger selves, we travel into the future. It’s not easy to explain but then it hasn’t been done before.”

“It’s hard to say what’s been the most joyful thing for me ( Benny ) with this project. If it’s the involvement in creating the concert together with everyone or being back in the studio together again after 40 years. I think hearing Frida and Agnetha singing again is hard to beat. When you come to the arena you will have the four of us together with an absolutely glorious 10-piece band. And even if not in the flesh, we will be right there, thanks to the work of the creative team and ILM.”

“Those first sessions back in 2018 were such fun and when Benny called and asked if I’d ( Anni-Frid ) consider singing some more I jumped at it! And what songs!! My respect and love go out to these exceptionally talented, truly genius songwriters! Such joy it was to work with the group again. I am so happy with what we have made, and I dearly hope our fans feel the same.”

“When we got back together in the studio I ( Agnetha) had no idea what to expect…But Benny’s recording studio is such a friendly and safe environment, and before I knew it I was really enjoying myself! I can hardly believe that finally, the moment has come to share this with the world!”

“They’re such amazing singers those two, I ( Björn) was completely floored by the way they delivered those songs. They’re true musicians; totally unimpressed by pop star glamour but still having a great time being creative in a recording studio. The “Voyage” project has injected new life into us in more ways than one.”

“So, again, thanks for waiting! We hope to see you in the “ABBA Arena” and yes – see – because we have infused a good deal of our souls into those avatars. It’s not an exaggeration to say that we’re back.”

Agnetha, Björn, Benny, Anni-Frid

Stockholm, Sweden, 2nd September 2021

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ABBA Voyage 2024: What is it, where is it, best seats and how to buy tickets?

Gimme! Gimme! Gimme! ABBA Voyage is a ground-breaking concert experience that brings the '70s into the modern age for one spectacular evening. Here’s everything you need to know.

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Are you in the mood for a dance? Well, now’s your chance to bust out your best moves and go back to the '70s with ABBA Voyage.

After 40 years off stage, you can now see the Swedish supergroup reunite and perform their classic hits in one unforgettable concert experience. Described as "jaw-dropping" by fans, ABBA Voyage combines live music with virtual reality to create a unique, immersive show.

Through the powers of modern technology, you’ll see Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid looking and sounding just as they did when they first shot to stardom in 1974. To explain how, the team at RadioTimes.com have put together this handy guide with everything you need to know about the concert, including price, location and how to buy.

Since debuting Waterloo at the Eurovision Song Contest, ABBA has earned a place as one of the biggest bands of all time with hits like Dancing Queen, Angel Eyes and, of course, Mamma Mia becoming part of the cultural zeitgeist. Over the years, the group has had many number one hits and is thought to have sold between 150 million to 385 million records worldwide.

ABBA has also had very public differences over the years, with two divorces splitting them up in 1982. But in 2017, talks of a virtual concert began and by 2021 they officially reunited to record the Voyage album, featuring new songs Don't Shut Me Down and Little Things.

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Now, you can see these new songs meet old hits from ABBA Gold for the legendary band's last hurrah. How could you ever refuse? Here’s what you need to know about the experience.

Plus, if you're a fan of the immersive, we've put together a list of the best immersive experiences to try in London. Plus, as always, we've got our recommendations of the best West End shows from long-running classics to new limited-time runs.

Buy ABBA Voyage tickets from £67 at London Theatre Direct

Buy ABBA Voyage tickets from £77 at Ticketmaster

Buy ABBA Voyage tickets from £80 at See Tickets

What is ABBA Voyage?

How does abba voyage work, where is the abba voyage arena, how much are abba voyage tickets, what are the best seats at abba voyage, how long is the abba voyage concert, how to buy abba voyage tickets.

ABBA Voyage is a live concert performed entirely by CGI versions of the four members of ABBA. The singers don’t appear in person but have instead recorded their voices and body movements to be transformed into 3D avatars (or ABBAtars).

Together, the reunited couples sing 22 of their greatest hits including Voulez-Vous, Lay All Your Love on Me and Thank You for the Music. They also perform perfectly choreographed dances and play virtual instruments, all the while getting backed by a live 10-piece band.

The show runs every Thursday to Monday with concerts usually taking place at 3pm or 7:45pm. In the audience, you can party from a seat, or book a spot on the dancefloor in the middle where you’ll find the other dancing queens. You can also hire a private booth for you and your super troop.

ABBA Voyage is currently running until January 2025, so don’t let this chance slip through your fingers and read on to find out how to get tickets.

The four avatars were created and designed by Industrial Light & Magic, a visual effects company responsible for the CGI in the Star Wars and Marvel films. With motion capture technology, Agnetha, Björn, Benny and Anni-Frid appear life-like on stage to perform the full setlist, complete with singing, dancing and piano-playing.

All members of the band were involved in the creation of the concert, which makes it unsurprising that the avatars are younger versions of themselves. But with the lighting, sound, and cutting-edge special effects, you’d never know that nearly 50 years had passed since they first stepped onto the stage at Eurovision.

The singing was done by the present-day band members who performed the 22-song set over the course of five weeks while wearing motion-capture suits. The choreography is also based on the Swedes’ real movements but was actually filmed by younger body doubles. Then, on the night, all of this is put together into one seamless projection and is backed by a real band.

Looking for more exciting things to try in the capital city? Take a look at the best immersive museums or London experience gifts to treat someone to.

The ABBA Arena is a temporary building that was entirely purpose-built for this project. It sits in Queen Elizabeth Park in Stratford (where the 2012 Olympics took place) - and with a big light-up ABBA sign on the front, it’s pretty hard to miss.

The nearest station is Pudding Mill Lane, which is available on the DLR, but you can also go to Stratford station (on the Jubilee, Central, Elizabeth, DLR and Overground lines) and Stratford International (which has National Rail services).

The only car parking at the venue is 10 blue badge spaces that need to be booked in advance. The building is also entirely accessible for wheelchair users, with accessible tickets and accessible companion tickets available to buy online.

ABBA Voyage hotel packages: where to stay near the ABBA Arena

If you don’t fancy fighting your way through London when the show’s over, there are plenty of hotel options open to you.

Holiday Extras has some great deals for packages that include tickets to the event and a one-night stay at a London hotel, plus breakfast the next morning. Currently, it's offering exclusive packages for the Holiday Inn at the London Docklands and the Crowne Plaza on Royal Victoria Dock.

Buy ABBA Voyage tickets and a hotel stay at Holiday Extras

The Ticketmaster site also has a range of hotel packages in places such as Canning Town and Stratford, which all look to be less than a 30-minute trip to the ABBA Voyage arena. The hotels also have breakfast included, so you can re-fuel after your incredible ABBA experience.

Buy ABBA Voyage tickets and a hotel stay at Ticketmaster

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We know you work all night and day to pay the bills you have to pay, so we’ve broken down the different prices you’ll find at ABBA Voyage.

There are four types of tickets you can book: auditorium seating, accessible seating, dance floor and dance booths. Within that, prices range depending on the date you want to book and where you choose to sit.

Here are the base prices for each ticket:

• Auditorium Seating – from £67
• Dance Floor – from £91
• Dance Booths – from £159.50
• Accessible Seats – from £67

There's a lot of questions about where you should sit at ABBA Voyage and, really, there's no one answer.

If you're looking for a boogie, then we'd recommend the Dance Floor or a Dance Booth. But if you're looking to relax, reports have said that the best place to sit is Block H, specifically the centre section – from there, you should have a perfect view of the ABBAtars, but won't feel like you're too far from the stage.

If you're going in a big group, there are eight Dance Booths at the arena, and each have capacity for 10-12 people. You can book the whole booth, or individual tickets. With the booth, you have your own dance floor and dedicated booth bar.

Tickets for the Dance Booths start at £159.50 per person .

The concert lasts for approximately 90 minutes with no interval. In that time, the ABBAtars will sing, dance and play their way through the full mega mix from Honey, Honey to Money, Money, Money.

Doors also open one hour and 45 minutes before the concert, so if you want to arrive early and get yourself in the dancing mood, you can take full advantage of the bar areas.

You can buy ABBA Voyage tickets from a number of official ticketing partners, including Ticketmaster , See Tickets , Today Tix and London Theatre Direct . All sites have good availability in the coming months so you’ve got lots of options for dates.

Shows run all week except Tuesdays and Wednesdays and are currently available to book until the end of November 2024.

For more musical days out, check out this list of the best West End shows and the best Candlelight concerts .

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ABBA Voyage setlist: Full list of songs performed at ABBA's hologram show

ABBA 's music undeniably transcends decades; its universal appeal bringing cross-generational joy the world over. And now, after announcing their ground-breaking ABBA Voyage show at its purpose-built ABBA Voyage Arena in London's Pudding Mill Lane last year, the spectacle is finally open to fans.

Featuring Agnetha Fältskog, Björn Ulvaeus,  Benny Andersson and Anni-Frid Lyngstad's classic back catalogue, plus tracks from the group's chart-topping 2021 record Voyage , the show uses digital 'ABBAtars' and invites fans to immerse themselves in a 360-degree experience.

The band saw significant uplift on the Official Albums Chart as the show garnered rave reviews, too. Their Gold - Greatest Hits collection recently returned to the Top 10, with Voulez-Vous also proving particularly popular .

If you're going along to one of the shows and want to know what you can expect, we reveal the entire setlist below. Oh, and there's a very exciting update from director Ludvig Andersson, too.

MORE: ABBA's Official Top 20 biggest songs in the UK revealed

Abba voyage setlist in full 2022: what songs are performed, the visitors, hole in your soul, knowing me, knowing you, does your mother know, lay all your love on me, summer night city, gimme gimme gimme (a man after midnight), voulez-vous, when all is said and done, don't shut me down, i still have faith in you, thank you for the music, dancing queen, the winner takes it all, where is abba's abba voyage arena.

ABBA's bespoke, 3000-capacity ABBA Voyage Arena venue is location in London's Pudding Mill Lane, right next to the DLR station.

How do I get tickets for ABBA Voyage in London?

Tickets for ABBA Voyage are available through the show's official website .

WATCH: ABBA reunite for the opening night of ABBA Voyage in London

Will ABBA add more songs to their ABBA Voyage show?

There have been whisperings among the fandom that the group may have recorded visuals for additional songs not featured in the show's current setlist, which have now been confirmed by Benny's son and show director Ludvig Andersson.

What has director Ludvig Andersson said about the ABBA Voyage setlist shake-up?

Speaking to Retro Pop Magazine, he teased: "We did more songs than we knew we were going to use. So there is more material.

"If this keeps running and people keep wanting to come and see it, we are intending to change a song out or update the show, because that’s also fun to do."

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Abba Voyage review: jaw-dropping avatar act that’s destined to be copied

Abba Arena, London Any sense you’re not actually in the presence of the band dissolves during a setlist of crowd-pleasing hits

T he opening of Abba’s Voyage show is undoubtedly an event – even the band’s most famously publicity-shy member, Agnetha Fältskog, is in attendance – but it’s one accompanied by a genuine sense of mystery. If the mystery isn’t as all-encompassing as that which surrounded the first night of Kate Bush’s return to live performance in 2014 – you at least have a pretty good idea in advance of what songs will be involved, which certainly wasn’t the case then – the question of precisely how Abba will be brought back to life almost 40 years after their last public performance remains veiled in secrecy.

We’ve all seen the band’s eerily de-aged digital avatars – or Abbatars, as they persist in calling them – but what form they take has remained classified: the only solid clue was that they weren’t holograms, which hasn’t stopped the British media doggedly referring to them as holograms ever since.

Whatever they are, the effect is genuinely jaw-dropping. Watching the four figures on the stage, it’s almost impossible to tell you’re not watching human beings: occasionally, there’s a hint of video game uncanny valley about the projections on the giant screens either side of the stage, but your attention is continually drawn to the human-sized avatars.

They gaze sadly into each other’s eyes during The Winner Takes It All, deliver cheesy speeches between songs – “I wasn’t married at the time,” says the figure representing Björn Ulvaeus, explaining the genesis of Does Your Mother Know, “or was I?” – and protest at the British judges giving them nul points during the 1974 Eurovision song contest. There are even lulls in the performance, just as there are at a “real” gig, usually when the action shifts from the avatars to more straightforward footage: a lengthy animation shown during Eagle providing an opportunity to visit the bar.

Aside from an opening salvo involving 1982’s darkly powerful The Visitors and Hole In Your Soul, a track from 1978’s Abba The Album, the setlist largely sticks to crowd-pleasing greatest hits – Waterloo, SOS, Knowing Me Knowing You – rather than scouring Abba’s oeuvre for deep cuts. This is both smart commercial sense – this is a show designed to run and run, potentially in several countries at once, something you’re never going to achieve if diehard fans are your target market – and probably for the best, given what a treacherous business scouring Abba’s oeuvre for deep cuts is.

You’re as likely to encounter something like Put On Your White Sombrero or King Kong Song – “can’t you hear the beating of the monkey tom-tom?” – as you are anything approaching the sublimity of Lay All Your Love On Me or The Winner Takes It All. Just as the Dolce & Gabbana-designed costumes rework the band’s 70s wardrobe in a tasteful way – evincing a restraint that Abba themselves seldom deployed in their heyday – so the music, performed by a live band, is occasionally faintly tweaked from the recorded versions the vocals are taken from: Voulez-Vous feels punchier and more raw.

By the time the show hits its finale with Thank You For The Music followed by Dancing Queen, any lingering sense that you’re not actually in the presence of Abba has dissolved. It’s so successful that it’s hard not to imagine other artists following suit – you strongly suspect the surviving members of Queen will be on the blower to Industrial Light & Magic before the week’s out.

However, Ulvaeus has already issued a warning to anyone planning on following Abba’s path to resurrect a deceased star: “It is better to do it with someone who is alive because … the measurements in the cranium are the same.” It’s a warning that’s going to go unheeded: access to cranial measurements or not, Voyage is the kind of triumph that’s destined not merely to run and run but be repeatedly copied.

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‘It’s a no’: Abba rule out appearing at 50th anniversary of Eurovision win

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ABBA Voyage

• May 2, 2024 Setlist

ABBA Voyage Setlist at ABBA Arena, London, England

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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.

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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.

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Recoding voyager 1—nasa’s interstellar explorer is finally making sense again, "we're pretty much seeing everything we had hoped for, and that's always good news.”.

Stephen Clark - Apr 23, 2024 5:56 pm UTC

Engineers have partially restored a 1970s-era computer on NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft after five months of long-distance troubleshooting, building confidence that humanity's first interstellar probe can eventually resume normal operations.

Several dozen scientists and engineers gathered Saturday in a conference room at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, or connected virtually, to wait for a new signal from Voyager 1. The ground team sent a command up to Voyager 1 on Thursday to recode part of the memory of the spacecraft's Flight Data Subsystem (FDS) , one of the probe's three computers.

“In the minutes leading up to when we were going to see a signal, you could have heard a pin drop in the room," said Linda Spilker, project scientist for NASA's two Voyager spacecraft at JPL. "It was quiet. People were looking very serious. They were looking at their computer screens. Each of the subsystem (engineers) had pages up that they were looking at, to watch as they would be populated."

Finally, a breakthrough

Launched nearly 47 years ago, Voyager 1 is flying on an outbound trajectory more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, and it takes 22-and-a-half hours for a radio signal to cover that distance at the speed of light. This means it takes nearly two days for engineers to uplink a command to Voyager 1 and get a response.

In November, Voyager 1 suddenly stopped transmitting its usual stream of data containing information about the spacecraft's health and measurements from its scientific instruments. Instead, the spacecraft's data stream was entirely unintelligible. Because the telemetry was unreadable, experts on the ground could not easily tell what went wrong. They hypothesized the source of the problem might be in the memory bank of the FDS.

There was a breakthrough last month when engineers sent up a novel command to "poke" Voyager 1's FDS to send back a readout of its memory. This readout allowed engineers to pinpoint the location of the problem in the FDS memory . The FDS is responsible for packaging engineering and scientific data for transmission to Earth.

After a few weeks, NASA was ready to uplink a solution to get the FDS to resume packing engineering data. This data stream includes information on the status of the spacecraft—things like power levels and temperature measurements. This command went up to Voyager 1 through one of NASA's large Deep Space Network antennas Thursday.

Then, the wait for a response. Spilker, who started working on Voyager right out of college in 1977, was in the room when Voyager 1's signal reached Earth Saturday.

"When the time came to get the signal, we could clearly see all of a sudden, boom, we had data, and there were tears and smiles and high fives," she told Ars. "Everyone was very happy and very excited to see that, hey, we're back in communication again with Voyager 1. We're going to see the status of the spacecraft, the health of the spacecraft, for the first time in five months."

Throughout the five months of troubleshooting, Voyager's ground team continued to receive signals indicating the spacecraft was still alive. But until Saturday, they lacked insight into specific details about the status of Voyager 1.

“It’s pretty much just the way we left it," Spilker said. "We're still in the initial phases of analyzing all of the channels and looking at their trends. Some of the temperatures went down a little bit with this period of time that's gone on, but we're pretty much seeing everything we had hoped for. And that's always good news.”

Relocating code

Through their investigation, Voyager's ground team discovered a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory stopped working, probably due to either a cosmic ray hit or a failure of aging hardware. This affected some of the computer's software code.

"That took out a section of memory," Spilker said. "What they have to do is relocate that code into a different portion of the memory, and then make sure that anything that uses those codes, those subroutines, know to go to the new location of memory, for access and to run it."

Only about 3 percent of the FDS memory was corrupted by the bad chip, so engineers needed to transplant that code into another part of the memory bank. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety, NASA said.

So the Voyager team divided the code into sections for storage in different places in the FDS. This wasn't just a copy-and-paste job. Engineers needed to modify some of the code to make sure it will all work together. "Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well," NASA said in a statement.

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April 22, 2024

After Months of Gibberish, Voyager 1 Is Communicating Well Again

NASA scientists spent months coaxing the 46-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft back into healthy communication

By Meghan Bartels

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.

NASA/JPL-Caltech

After months of nonsensical transmissions from humanity’s most distant emissary, NASA’s iconic Voyager 1 spacecraft is finally communicating intelligibly with Earth again.

Voyager 1 launched in 1977 , zipped past Jupiter and Saturn within just a few years and has been trekking farther from our sun ever since; the craft crossed into interstellar space in 2012. But in mid-November 2023 Voyager 1’s data transmissions became garbled , sending NASA engineers on a slow quest to troubleshoot the distant spacecraft. Finally, that work has paid off, and NASA has clear information on the probe’s health and status, the agency announced on April 22.

“It’s the most serious issue we’ve had since I’ve been the project manager, and it’s scary because you lose communication with the spacecraft,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in an interview with Scientific American when the team was still tracking down the issue.

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The Voyager 1 spacecraft is a scientific legend : It discovered that Jupiter’s moon Io, far from being a dead world like our own companion, is instead a supervolcanic world . The craft’s data suggested that Saturn’s moon Titan might have liquid on its surface. And for more than a decade, Voyager 1 has given scientists a glimpse at what space looks like beyond the influence of our sun.

Yet its long years in the harsh environment of space have done a number on the probe, which was designed to last just four years. In particular, degraded performance and low power supplies have forced NASA to turn off six of its 10 instruments, and its communication has gotten even spottier than can be explained by the fact that cosmic mechanics mean a signal takes nearly one Earth day to travel between humans and the probe.

When the latest communications glitch occurred last fall, scientists could still send signals to the distant probe, and they could tell that the spacecraft was operating. But all they got from Voyager 1 was gibberish—what NASA described in December 2023 as “a repeating pattern of ones and zeros.” The team was able to trace the issue back to a part of the spacecraft’s computer system called the flight data subsystem, or FDS, and identified that a particular chip within that system had failed.

Mission personnel couldn’t repair the chip. They were, however, able to break the code held on the failed chip into pieces they could tuck into spare corners of the FDS’s memory, according to NASA. The first such fix was transmitted to Voyager 1 on April 18. With a total distance of 30 billion miles to cross from Earth to the spacecraft and back, the team had to wait nearly two full days for a response from the probe. But on April 20 NASA got confirmation that the initial fix worked. Additional commands to rewrite the rest of the FDS system’s lost code are scheduled for the coming weeks, according to the space agency, including commands that will restore the spacecraft’s ability to send home science data.

Although, for now, Voyager 1 appears to be on the mend, NASA scientists know it won’t last forever. Sooner or later, a glitch they can’t fix will occur, or the spacecraft’s ever dwindling fuel supply will run out for good. Until then NASA is determined to get as much data as possible out of the venerable spacecraft—and its twin, Voyager 2, which experienced its own communications glitch earlier in 2023 .

Voyager 1 talking to Earth again after NASA engineers 24 billion kilometres away devise software fix

NASA's Voyager 1 probe — the most distant man-made object in the universe — is returning usable information to ground control following months of spouting gibberish, the US space agency says.

The spaceship stopped sending readable data back to Earth on November 14, 2023, even though controllers could tell it was still receiving their commands.

In March, teams working at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered that a single malfunctioning chip was to blame.

They then had to devise a clever coding fix that worked within the tight memory constraints of its 46-year-old computer system.

"There was a section of the computer memory no longer working," project leader Dr Linda Spilker told the ABC.

"So we had to reprogram what was in that memory, move it to a different location, link everything back together and send everything up in a patch.

"And then on Saturday morning, we watched as Voyager 1 sent its first commands back and we knew we were back in communication once again."

Dr Spilker said they were receiving engineering data, so they knew the health and safety of the spacecraft.

"The next step is going to be to develop a patch so we can send back the science data," she said.

"That will really be exciting, to once again learn about interstellar space and what has been going on there that we've missed since November."

Dr Spilker said Voyager sent back data in real time, so the team had no facility to retrieve data covering the time since transmission was lost.

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 was mankind's first spacecraft to enter the interstellar medium , in 2012, and is currently more than 24 billion kilometres from Earth.

Messages sent from Earth take about 22.5 hours to reach the spacecraft.

Its twin, Voyager 2, also left the solar system in 2018 as it was tracked by Australia's Parkes radio telescope.

Australia was also vital to a 2023 search for Voyager 2 after signals were lost, with Canberra's Deep Space Communication Complex monitoring for signals and then sending a successful command to shift the spacecraft's antenna 2 degrees . 

Both Voyager spacecraft carry " Golden Records ": 12-inch, gold-plated copper disks intended to convey the story of our world to extraterrestrials.

These include a map of our solar system, a piece of uranium that serves as a radioactive clock allowing recipients to date the spaceship's launch, and symbolic instructions that convey how to play the record.

The contents of the record, selected for NASA by a committee chaired by legendary astronomer Carl Sagan, include encoded images of life on Earth, as well as music and sounds that can be played using an included stylus.

Their power banks were expected to be depleted sometime after 2025, but Dr Spilker said several systems had been turned off, so they were hopeful the two spacecraft would function into the 2030s.

They will then continue to wander the Milky Way, potentially for eternity, in silence.

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