This isn’t what I’m writing about this week, but it’s noteworthy:
“NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth“
Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL), California Institute of Technology (April 22, 2024 )“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,…”
As I’m writing this, Voyager 1 has been outward bound for 46 years, seven months, 18 days and about two hours. And now it’s back online, and sending back useful data. Not bad, for something launched in the mid-1960s.
I’ve mentioned Voyager 1, but not often:
- “Space ‘Firsts:’ New Horizons, Chang’e-4“
(January 18, 2019) - “Cassini-Huygens Mission“
(September 15, 2017)
More about Voyager 1:
- Wikipedia
- NASA/JPL, California Institute of Technology
- Voyager
- Mission Overview
- Mission Status
- Interstellar Science
- Timeline (starting with Summer 1965: A Once-in-a-Lifetime Alignment)
- Spacecraft
- Voyager
