NASA’s 47-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft not too long ago established contact with Earth after a short halt with the assistance of a radio transmitter that has not been used since 1981. NASA engineers at Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California re-established contact with the spacecraft on October 24.

The spacecraft, which is in interstellar house over 15 billion miles away, skilled a short interruption in communication on October 16 because of a shutdown of one among its transmitters. This shutdown was doubtless triggered by the spacecraft’s fault safety system, which powers down sure programs when energy utilization is just too excessive.

In line with NASA, a message takes round 23 hours to journey a technique – from Earth to Voyager 1 and vice-versa. On October 16, when the NASA engineers despatched a command to the spacecraft, they may not detect its response until October 18. A day later, communication with Voyager 1 stopped utterly.

After an investigation, the house company crew found that Voyager 1’s fault safety system had switched the spacecraft to a second, lower-power transmitter.

Voyager 1 has two radio transmitters, however has been utilizing just one for years referred to as an ‘X-band’. Nonetheless, the opposite transmitter – the ‘S-band’ – makes use of a special frequency which has not been employed since 1981.

Presently, NASA has opted to keep away from switching again to the X-band transmitter till they will decide what activated the fault safety system – which can take weeks.

“Engineers are being cautious as a result of they need to decide whether or not there are any potential dangers to turning on the X-band. Within the meantime, engineers despatched a message to Voyager 1 on October 22 to examine that the S-band transmitter was working and obtained affirmation on October 24. Nevertheless it’s not a repair the crew needs to depend on for too lengthy,” Voyager mission assurance supervisor, Bruce Waggoner informed CNN.

Voyager 1 was launched after Voyager 2, however due to a sooner route it exited the asteroid belt sooner than its twin, and it overtook Voyager 2 on December 15, 1977. The spacecraft is the primary human-made object to enterprise into interstellar house.

The spacecraft was the primary to cross the heliosphere – the boundary the place the influences from outdoors our photo voltaic system are stronger than these from the Solar.

To this point, the Voyager 1 has found a skinny ring round Jupiter and two new Jovian moons – Thebe and Metis. It additionally discovered 5 new moons and a brand new ring referred to as ‘G-Ring’ at Saturn.