Hello, It’s Me”: NASA’s Voyager 1 establishes contact from 15 billion miles away

The Voyager 1 spacecraft stopped sending readable data back to Earth on November 14, 2023, even though controllers could still see that it was receiving their commands. In March, teams at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory found a single malfunctioning chip to be the cause and created a clever coding fix that worked within the tight memory constraints of the 46-year-old computer system. The agency announced that Voyager 1 was now returning usable data about the health and status of its engineering systems. The next goal for NASA is to enable the spacecraft to start returning science data once again.

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to enter the interstellar medium in 2012 and is currently more than 15 billion miles 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. Both spacecraft carry “Golden Records” intended to convey the story of our world to extraterrestrials.

The contents of the record, selected for NASA by a committee chaired by astronomer Carl Sagan, include encoded images of life on Earth, music, and sounds that can be played using an included stylus. Their power banks are expected to be depleted sometime after 2025. After that, they will continue to wander the Milky Way, potentially for eternity, in silence.