The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data last November. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft's coding to work around the trouble.
It takes 22 1/2 hours to send a signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space. The signal travel time is double that for a round trip.
Launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 has been exploring interstellar space since 2012. Its twin, Voyager 2, is 12.6 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) away and still working fine.
-- Marcia Dunn for Associated Press, "NASA hears from Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, after months of quiet" (23 April 2024)
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