Voyager 1 ends 'radio silence' thanks to NASA's software repair 15 billion miles away from Earth

After five months of radio silence, National Aeronautics and Space Administration's (NASA) Voyager 1 probe is back from the dead.

In a stellar display of problem-solving, a team of mission engineers have devised a workaround to a key computer chip whose failure led the 46-year-old spacecraft to only beam back an indecipherable repeating pattern of code.

Beaming gibberish

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Since November last year, Voyager 1's flight data system had been stuck in a loop. The spacecraft, which is currently around 15 billion miles away from earth, began sending gibberish that NASA could not decipher. The data received was unusable, and the scientists were unable to determine Voyager 1's health status.

Months later, in March, the Voyager engineering team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California confirmed that the "issue was tied to one of the spacecraft's three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS)."

"The FDS is responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it's sent to Earth," reports NASA.

They found that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory wasn't working.

Now, NASA scientists have devised an audacious workaround the ageing spacecraft's faulty chip — they rewrote the corrupted software from scratch and relocated it piecemeal into unaffected areas of the probe's computer memory.

How did they do it?

The team started their journey towards finding a possible solution by "singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft's engineering data," and sending "it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18."

According to NASA, "a radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, which is over 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometres) from Earth, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth."

"When the mission flight team heard back from the spacecraft on April 20, they saw that the modification worked: For the first time in five months, they have been able to check the health and status of the spacecraft," added the space agency.

Although old, Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 are one of humanity's greatest achievements. The twin voyager spacecraft "are the longest-running and most distant spacecraft in history."

(With inputs from agencies)