NASA engineers repair spacecraft that's 14 billion miles away from Earth

Voyager probes are human-made spacecrafts that have gone farthest from the Earth. The spacecrafts have left the Solar System and are still moving ahead into interstellar space. It is quite a thing of wonder that the spacecrafts have been able to maintain contact with the Earth. They are still sending invaulable information.

It was therefore an alarming situation when Attitude Articulation and Control System (AACS) of Voyager-1 started sending garbled data. The AACS keeps the probe's antenna pointed at Earth.

NASA engineers have analysed the probe's data for months and now have been able to fix the problem.

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"The team has since located the source of the garbled information: The AACS had started sending the telemetry data through an onboard computer known to have stopped working years ago, and the computer corrupted the information," Nasa has said in an update.

Voyager-1 is so far away from the Earth that a signal from the probe takes 21 hours 45 minutes 45 seconds to reach Earth. And even with best of equipments here on Earth, a signal takes same amount of time to reach Voyager.

It's good news anyway that humanity's herald is back in good shape.

“We’re happy to have the telemetry back. We’ll do a full memory readout of the AACS and look at everything it’s been doing. That will help us try to diagnose the problem that caused the telemetry issue in the first place. So, we’re cautiously optimistic, but we still have more investigation to do,” Suzanne Dodd, Voyager’s project manager, said in a statement.

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