NASA recently solved a communication problem with Voyager 1, the farthest human-made spacecraft, which has been traveling in space since 1977.
Voyager 1’s signals started coming back scrambled and unreadable in November 2023. After months of investigation, NASA engineers found the cause: a small part of the spacecraft’s memory was damaged. This damaged chip in the flight data subsystem (FDS) stopped Voyager 1 from sending clear data back to Earth.
The problem began when NASA asked Voyager 1 to send a full memory readout in March 2024. Due to space radiation or normal wear and tear from almost 50 years in space, one chip failed.
In April 2025, NASA fixed the issue from 15 billion miles away by moving the affected software to different memory areas. Since the code was too large for one spot, they split it into parts and reprogrammed them to work together. This allowed Voyager 1 to send clear data again after five months of silence.
Because Voyager 1 is so far, radio signals take about 22.5 hours to reach it and the same time for its reply. This made the repair process slow.
NASA now plans to reorganize the rest of the software so Voyager 1 can resume sending scientific data as it journeys deeper into space. Though the spacecraft is incredibly old, engineers hope to keep it working as long as possible.
