A number of months after a grave laptop drawback appeared to spell the top for Voyager 1, which for practically a half century had offered knowledge on the outer planets and the far reaches of the photo voltaic system, NASA introduced on Thursday that it had restored the spacecraft to working order.

“The spacecraft has resumed gathering details about interstellar area,” NASA said in its announcement about Voyager 1, the farthest man-made object in space.

Because the drawback surfaced in November, engineers had been working to diagnose and resolve the problem, a tedious and prolonged course of difficult by the truth that it takes nearly two days to ship and obtain info from Voyager 1, which was the primary man-made object ever to enter interstellar area and is at the moment greater than 15 billion miles from Earth.

The area neighborhood had been holding its breath since final yr because the prospect of fixing the growing older probe appeared as dire as ever.

In February, Suzanne Dodd, the Voyager mission mission supervisor, mentioned the issue, which hindered Voyager 1’s skill to ship coherent engineering and science knowledge again to Earth, was “essentially the most critical concern” the probe had confronted since she started main the mission in 2010.

Voyager 1 and its twin probe, Voyager 2, had been launched in 1977 on a mission to discover the outer planets. NASA capitalized on a uncommon alignment within the photo voltaic system that enabled the probes to go to the 4 of the outer planets — Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune — through the use of the gravity of every to swing to the following.

Its planetary mission a hit, Voyager 1 continued its journey towards the sting of the photo voltaic system, and in 1990 it snapped a fabled picture of the Earth — a tiny speck in an infinite darkness that grew to become often called the “pale blue dot.”

In 2012, the probe grew to become the primary to cross into interstellar area and had since, together with its twin, which adopted six years later, collected knowledge concerning the heliosphere, the area across the solar straight beneath the solar’s affect.

Maybe as profound because the pale blue dot, every spacecraft is supplied with a golden phonograph loaded with sound recordings and pictures exhibiting humanity and life on Earth, begging to at some point be found by one other civilization.

The outlook for recovering Voyager 1 improved substantially in April, when NASA reported that it had managed to get the probe to ship again “usable” knowledge about its engineering programs and its well being. That was adopted by information late final month that the workforce had restored performance to 2 of Voyager 1’s science devices, permitting it to ship again science knowledge and proceed its mission.

On Thursday, the company introduced that it had introduced the remaining devices again on-line and restored Voyager 1 to its regular operations.

Nonetheless, Voyager 1’s new lease on life might not final very lengthy. NASA has beforehand estimated that the nuclear-powered turbines on Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 had been prone to die round 2025. However Voyager 1 has already demonstrated that it will probably beat the chances. Ms. Dodd hopes each Voyager spacecraft can attain the mission’s fiftieth anniversary in 2027.