At 47 age older , the pair of Voyager probe are the old presently operational recondite space mission , and in their time they have traveled all the way through our solar organization and out into the interstellar space that lie beyond the influence of our sun . At a distance of around 15.4 billion miles away from Earth , and with hardware construct in the 1970s , the dyad have face their portion of technical difficulties .
Voyager 1 in particular had a serious issue with its communications system this year that forbid it from broadcast skill data for months . But now , following some very careful fixes , Voyager 1 is back online again , having resumed its science operations and continue its farseeing , lonely mission .
The communicating job was announce inDecember last year , when a system anticipate the telemetry modulation unit stopped communicating with the investigation ’s computer system , called the flying data system . That topic was fixed inApril this year , by engineers cleverly divvying up the workplace of a broken chip and propagate it throughout the functioning computer system . InJune , Voyager 1 could power its scientific discipline instruments back on and return to its reflexion .
That was n’t the remnant of the probe ’s trouble though . In October , the space vehicle turned off one of its radio transmitters for no obvious reason , in what seemed to be an automatic response when the space vehicle detects a fault . Non - essential systems are designed to flex themselves off when an anomalous effect occurs to forestall damage , such as from draw too much power . But this meant that part of the communications system of rules call off the X - stripe radio transmitter was no longer working properly , and the ballistic capsule could only pass along using a weaker transmission organisation called the S - stria .
It was n’t cleared if the S - band signal would even be strong enough to be cull up from Earth , but engineers were able-bodied to place the signaling and keep in sense of touch with the spacecraft . This meant they were n’t able to get scientific discipline information though , due to communicating restriction .
Before they could turn the X - band transmitter back on , engineers had to envision out what had touch off the fault detection in the first situation . It flex out to have been work on a radiator that caused the flaw , as the ballistic capsule is operating on such a tiny amount of power . Though its power author output around 470 Isaac Watts on launching , the spacecraft mislay 4 Watt of power each class , so power is a incessant concern . The spacecraft presently uses four of its 10 original science instruments .
Engineers reactivate the X - ring transmitter earlier this month , and has been collecting data again since last workweek . With a few final labor like reset a organisation that synchronizes the ballistic capsule ’s three onboard computers , it will be back to full operations once again .
