The student news site of Day Creek Intermediate School

The Day Creek Howl

The student news site of Day Creek Intermediate School

The Day Creek Howl

The student news site of Day Creek Intermediate School

The Day Creek Howl

Voyager 1 responds back home

Artist’s concept of the Voyager craft in interstellar space attempting to send signals to NASA.

Credit: NASA
Artist’s concept of the Voyager craft in interstellar space attempting to send signals to NASA. Credit: NASA

Both Voyagers were launched in 1977. Ever since then, the twin probes have explored the outer reaches of the solar system and beyond. Both Voyagers send data about deep space after taking majestic pictures of the great gas giants. One of its current missions is to escape the sun’s final domain and reach interstellar space.

However, trouble arose on November 14, when Voyager 1’s signals became corrupted and unreadable. Speaking with Voyager 1 is already difficult enough. It takes 45 hours for NASA to get a response from Voyager as it is a whopping 15 billion miles away (signals travel around 671 million miles per hour.)

According to USA Today, on March 1st, NASA sent a “poke” command in an endeavor to bypass the corrupted data. Then on March 3rd, NASA got a response – one that was illegible and another in its original signal tone. Four days later, NASA began to decipher the signal. By March 10th, Deep Space Network engineers at JPL finished decoding and found Voyager’s full flight memory. NASA is currently diagnosing the original source of corruption.

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About the Contributor
David B.
David B., SODC/Big News
David likes to write. But in most of his spare time he enjoys playing games and reading articles to learn about new things. He also enjoys school and learning new things. He wants to be a professor.