Hi, It’s Me”: NASA’s Voyager 1 Makes Contact From 15 Billion Miles Away

The spaceship Voyager 1 stopped sending readable data back to Earth on November 14, 2023. Although controllers could tell it was still receiving their commands, the data was not accessible. In March, teams at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory discovered that a single malfunctioning chip was the cause, and devised a clever coding fix that worked within the tight memory constraints of its 46-year-old computer system. Consequently, the agency announced that “Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems.”

Additionally, a post from NASA Voyager’s X handle stated, “Hi, it’s me. – V1,” signaling a successful restoration of functionality. The next objective is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 became mankind’s 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 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 are expected to be depleted sometime after 2025. After this, they will continue to journey through the Milky Way potentially for eternity, in silence.