BETHLEHEM, Pa. — WLVR’s Brad Klein reviews the week’s astronomical highlights with Bethlehem’s ‘Backyard Astronomy Guy,’ Marty McGuire.
This week, they discuss the Voyager 1 spacecraft.
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 to monitor interstellar space and send back findings to Earth. According to McGuire, it is now the furthest man-made object from Earth, having travelled to a distance of around 15 billion miles away.
The robotic spacecraft has experienced some malfunctions over the years, and last November, Voyager 1 started sending unreadable data back to Earth, McGuire said.
But scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab on Earth were able to find a workaround that has allowed the nearly half century old spacecraft to resume communicating with Earth.
A software command sent through space allows Voyager 1 to ‘work around’ a single malfunctioning computer chip, and continue its mission. As of now, Voyager 1 continues to collect data from the depths of the space.