https://www.boredpanda.com/voyager-1-sends-data-back-earth-after-months-silence/?_t=1&_f=featured
The 46-year-old spaceship stopped sending readable data back to Earth on November 14, 2023. Controllers could tell that the spaceship was receiving their command, but the system was stuck in a loop of sending an indecipherable pattern of code back.
The engineering team discovered in March that the problem was with a crucial chip inside one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers called the flight data subsystem (FDS). It is the FDS that is responsible for packaging the data before it is shot back to Earth.
“The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working,”
The space agency then ingeniously crafted a coding solution that successfully navigated through the 46-year-old computer system and restored the proper receiving of data from Voyager 1.
“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,” NASA happily announced in the Monday statement. “The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again.