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Millennium Space Systems Awards Contract to Voyager Space to Build Star Trackers

Voyager’s µSTAR-250 Star Tracker represents the next generation of high-performance trackers, leveraging Scientific CMOS technology to provide very low read noise for optimal accuracy. Built to deliver precise situational awareness in space, including satellite attitude and rate determination, µSTAR-250’s reliability and radiation tolerance make it ideal for long-duration missions in LEO, MEO, GEO and cislunar orbits. This star tracker has accumulated thousands of hours of space flight heritage on a classified program.

“We are pleased to have been selected by Millennium Space Systems to support its upcoming mission,” said Frank Morgan, Chief Operating Officer, Voyager Space. “Our µSTAR-250 Star Trackers represent a significant leap in satellite navigation and performance in the ever-evolving world of space exploration. We look forward to providing Millennium with the tools to strengthen their constellations’ precision, reliability, and adaptability.”

µSTAR-250 can be calibrated on-orbit in real time. Its space-flight-proven software and algorithms utilize the Pyramid Code for star identification and deliver real-time quaternion output. µSTAR-250 can also provide raw image data and be configured for Space Domain Awareness. American sourced and manufactured in San Diego, Calif., µSTAR-250 is fully compliant with National Defense Authorization Act (NDAA) 2021 domestic sourcing specifications.

Voyager Space’s full line of electro-optic subsystems includes SpaceCam™ 5MP and 9MP, Coarse and Medium Sun Sensors, in addition to Star Trackers such as the µSTAR-250.

About Voyager Space

Voyager Space is dedicated to building a better future for humanity in space and on Earth. With over 35 years of spaceflight heritage and over 2,000 successful missions, Voyager is powering the commercial space revolution. Voyager delivers exploration, technology, and defense solutions to a global customer base that includes civil and national security agencies, commercial companies, academic and research institutions, and more.

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Voyager Space Holdings sets it sights on space stations with majority stake in Nanoracks

Voyager Space Holdings has added X.O. Markets, the parent of commercial space service venture Nanoracks, to its growing catalogue of space companies. The agreement was first announced last December .

This is Voyager’s fourth majority stake acquisition of a space company since its founding in October 2019, and it won’t be its last. Voyager CEO Dylan Taylor told TechCrunch that he anticipates the company will announce two to four more acquisitions this year. It’s an aggressive strategy, but key to understanding Voyager’s business model.

“A lot of people confuse us with a fund or private equity strategy, or some kind of a financial instrument, for lack of a better word, and we’re really none of those things,” Taylor said. “We’re an operating company.”

Voyager wants to reach the same level of capability as the space “primes,” or primary companies, in seven to 10 years. To get there, it’s pursued a majority stake in a series of space ventures to build out its portfolio of capabilities. Notably, Voyager has always never opted for 100% equity in these companies, and it operates in a relatively decentralized way. These business decisions help keep innovation flourishing amongst Voyager’s many ventures, Taylor said.

The typical strategy in private equity — to purchase two competing companies, merge them and sell them onto another financial buyer — doesn’t ultimately spur growth of the new space economy, he pointed out.

“[That strategy is] really not how you capture value in space,” he said. “You capture value in space by Capability A, marrying it with Capability B and unlocking a new Capability C that’s higher up on the food chain.”

The company also plans to go public via a traditional initial public offering sometime around the third quarter of this year. It anticipates filing the S-1 at some point this summer, Taylor said. He declined to provide further details of the recent acquisition.

Voyager Space Holdings to acquire multi-launch site startup The Launch Company

Voyager’s previous major acquisitions have been with Pioneer Astronautics, an R&D company that performs, amongst other things, research into supporting life in space; advanced robotics startup Altius Space Machines; and The Launch Company, a launch support company that provides standardized hardware and equipment to launch providers.

The newest acquisition, Nanoracks, has been involved in more than 1,000 projects with the International Space Station, most importantly installing the first commercial airlock on the ISS. Last November, the company also entered into a partnership with the Abu Dhabi Investment Office to research agricultural solutions in challenging physical environments, like the desert — or space.

Perhaps the most interesting of Nanoracks’ endeavors is what it calls its Outpost program: building and operating completely commercial space stations out of the spent upper stages of launch vehicles and other space debris. Nanoracks will be launching a demonstration mission onboard a SpaceX mission next month.

The four acquisitions taken together — launch support, advanced robotics, a research company and now Nanoracks — clearly point to a future in which Voyager is primed to build and operate commercial space stations. While that future is still far off, it’s closer than one might think.

“The last 10 years of the industry was defined by getting to orbit,” Taylor said. “I think the next 10 years will be about destinations. I think it’s highly likely we’re going to have somewhere between eight-12 space stations in orbit by 2030.”

More new space consolidation as Voyager Space Holdings acquires Pioneer Astronautics

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Voyager Space Announces Teaming Agreement with Northrop Grumman for the Starlab Space Station

Voyager Space (Voyager) today announced they plan to enter a teaming agreement with Northrop Grumman (NYSE: NOC) to develop fully autonomous rendezvous and docking technology for Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft and provide cargo resupply services for the Starlab space station, which will be built and operated under a transatlantic joint venture between Voyager Space and Airbus Defence and Space (Airbus). The companies will further explore opportunities to strengthen the development of Starlab, a free-flying space station, and the enhanced Cygnus system, to serve the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA) Commercial Low-Earth Orbit (LEO) Development program (CLDP). The parties also are exploring opportunities for Northrop Grumman to provide engineering services in support of the design and development of Starlab.

Under this teaming agreement, Voyager Space and Northrop Grumman agreed to a framework under which Northrop Grumman will perform services to upgrade its flight-proven Cygnus cargo vehicle with a fully autonomous docking system to support Starlab missions. Autonomous docking, the ability for two spacecraft to dock independently from human controllers, is a critical technology enabling complex in-orbit and deep space operations.

Northrop Grumman’s Cygnus spacecraft will be utilized to deliver pressurized cargo to Starlab over an initial five-year period to support future human spaceflight missions. The Cygnus spacecraft has completed 19 missions, delivering over 138,000 pounds of cargo to the International Space Station (ISS). Cygnus has already demonstrated several advanced capabilities, including the ability to function as a laboratory while docked to ISS, deploy satellites, and reboost the station’s orbit.

“We are fully committed to the future of commercial LEO. Our new role with Starlab supports NASA’s initiatives to encourage commercial space station development as part of a growing LEO economy,” said Steve Krein, Vice President of Civil and Commercial Space at Northrop Grumman.

“This collaboration is a major step forward for the Starlab program,” said Dylan Taylor, Chairman and CEO of Voyager Space. “Northrop Grumman’s technical capability and proven success in cargo resupply services will play a pivotal role as we accelerate Starlab’s development. We’re proud to be supporting advanced docking systems that push LEO transportation operations forward and advance critical technology for deep space exploration. We are thrilled to have Northrop Grumman on our Starlab team.”

Voyager and Northrop Grumman’s teaming follows recent news from Voyager and Airbus announcing an agreement to form a transatlantic joint venture to develop and operate the Starlab space station, ensuring a continued human presence in LEO and launching before the ISS is decommissioned.

About Voyager Space

Voyager Space is dedicated to building a better future for humanity in space and on Earth. With over 35 years of spaceflight heritage and over 2,000 successful missions, Voyager is powering the commercial space revolution. Voyager delivers exploration, technology, and defense solutions to a global customer base that includes civil and national security agencies, commercial companies, academic and research institutions, and more.

SpaceRef co-founder, Explorers Club Fellow, ex-NASA, Away Teams, Journalist, Space & Astrobiology, Lapsed climber.

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Voyager Space Holdings to acquire Altius Space Machines

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WASHINGTON — Voyager Space Holdings, a company recently established to serve as a holding company and long-term funding source for space startups, has acquired its first company, space technology firm Altius Space Machines.

Voyager announced Oct. 23 its intent to acquire Altius, a deal that it said is subject to “customary closing conditions.” Terms of the deal between the two Colorado-based companies were not disclosed.

Engineer and space entrepreneur Jon Goff founded Altius in 2010 after serving as lead propulsion engineer for Masten Space Systems when it won the Northrop Grumman Lunar Lander Challenge, part of NASA’s Centennial Challenges Program, in 2009. Altius has worked on a variety of spacecraft technologies since its founding.

In recent years, Altius focused on satellite servicing systems, including technologies for grappling spacecraft and propellant transfer. The company has proposed its own satellite servicing system, called Bulldog, a project that would require Altius to raise significant additional funding.

“As an entrepreneur in a leading-edge portion of the space market, it’s been challenging to secure the financial resources we’ve needed to deliver on our vision,” Goff, chief executive of Altius, said in a statement. “When the Voyager team explained their vision, I knew it was an amazing opportunity to not only accelerate bringing our Bulldog servicing vehicle to market, but also to make a bigger difference in the entrepreneurial space industry.”

That work in satellite servicing technology drew Voyager’s interest. “Altius is a market leader, blazing the trail for on-orbit servicing technology in our industry,” Matthew Kuta, president and chief operating officer of Voyager, said in the statement.

Space industry investor Dylan Taylor founded Voyager to serve as a holding company for a variety of emerging space companies, willing to support companies over time horizons longer than traditional venture capitalists. Voyager announced its plans in early October , including a board that features retired Air Force Gen. William Shelton and former NASA associate administrator for science Alan Stern.

In addition to capital, Voyager will also provide shared services, such as human resources, to its portfolio of companies. “It will really free up the engineers to do what their passion and expertise is,” Kuta said in an Oct. 3 interview about the firm’s establishment.

Kuta said in that earlier interview that Voyager is looking for companies that are beyond the seed stage and are producing revenue in the range of a few million to a few tens of millions of dollars. One of the areas of interest he said then was on-orbit servicing, along with analytics.

Jeff Foust writes about space policy, commercial space, and related topics for SpaceNews. He earned a Ph.D. in planetary sciences from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and a bachelor’s degree with honors in geophysics and planetary science... More by Jeff Foust

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NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft finally phones home after 5 months of no contact

On Saturday, April 5, Voyager 1 finally "phoned home" and updated its NASA operating team about its health.

NASA's interstellar explorer Voyager 1 is finally communicating with ground control in an understandable way again. On Saturday (April 20), Voyager 1 updated ground control about its health status for the first time in 5 months. While the Voyager 1 spacecraft still isn't sending valid science data back to Earth, it is now returning usable information about the health and operating status of its onboard engineering systems. 

Thirty-five years after its launch in 1977, Voyager 1 became the first human-made object to leave the solar system and enter interstellar space . It was followed out of our cosmic quarters by its space-faring sibling, Voyager 2 , six years later in 2018. Voyager 2, thankfully, is still operational and communicating well with Earth. 

The two spacecraft remain the only human-made objects exploring space beyond the influence of the sun. However, on Nov. 14, 2023, after 11 years of exploring interstellar space and while sitting a staggering 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth, Voyager 1's binary code — computer language composed of 0s and 1s that it uses to communicate with its flight team at NASA — stopped making sense.

Related: We finally know why NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft stopped communicating — scientists are working on a fix

In March, NASA's Voyager 1 operating team sent a digital "poke" to the spacecraft, prompting its flight data subsystem (FDS) to send a full memory readout back home.

This memory dump revealed to scientists and engineers that the "glitch" is the result of a corrupted code contained on a single chip representing around 3% of the FDS memory. The loss of this code rendered Voyager 1's science and engineering data unusable.

The NASA team can't physically repair or replace this chip, of course, but what they can do is remotely place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. Though no single section of the memory is large enough to hold this code entirely, the team can slice it into sections and store these chunks separately. To do this, they will also have to adjust the relevant storage sections to ensure the addition of this corrupted code won't cause those areas to stop operating individually, or working together as a whole. In addition to this, NASA staff will also have to ensure any references to the corrupted code's location are updated.

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On April 18, 2024, the team began sending the code to its new location in the FDS memory. This was a painstaking process, as a radio signal takes 22.5 hours to traverse the distance between Earth and Voyager 1, and it then takes another 22.5 hours to get a signal back from the craft. 

By Saturday (April 20), however, the team confirmed their modification had worked. For the first time in five months, the scientists were able to communicate with Voyager 1 and check its health. Over the next few weeks, the team will work on adjusting the rest of the FDS software and aim to recover the regions of the system that are responsible for packaging and returning vital science data from beyond the limits of the solar system.

Join our Space Forums to keep talking space on the latest missions, night sky and more! And if you have a news tip, correction or comment, let us know at: [email protected].

Robert Lea is a science journalist in the U.K. whose articles have been published in Physics World, New Scientist, Astronomy Magazine, All About Space, Newsweek and ZME Science. He also writes about science communication for Elsevier and the European Journal of Physics. Rob holds a bachelor of science degree in physics and astronomy from the U.K.’s Open University. Follow him on Twitter @sciencef1rst.

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• Robb62 'V'ger must contact the creator. Reply
• Holy HannaH! Couldn't help but think that "repair" sounded extremely similar to the mechanics of DNA and the evolution of life. Reply
• Torbjorn Larsson *Applause* indeed, thanks to the Voyager teams for the hard work! Reply
• SpaceSpinner I notice that the article says that it has been in space for 35 years. Either I have gone back in time 10 years, or their AI is off by 10 years. V-*ger has been captured! Reply

Admin said: On Saturday, April 5, Voyager 1 finally "phoned home" and updated its NASA operating team about its health. The interstellar explorer is back in touch after five months of sending back nonsense data. NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft finally phones home after 5 months of no contact : Read more

evw said: I'm incredibly grateful for the persistence and dedication of the Voyagers' teams and for the amazing accomplishments that have kept these two spacecrafts operational so many years beyond their expected lifetimes. V-1 was launched when I was 25 years young; I was nearly delirious with joy. Exploring the physical universe captivated my attention while I was in elementary school and has kept me mesmerized since. I'm very emotional writing this note, thinking about what amounts to a miracle of technology and longevity in my eyes. BRAVO!!! THANK YOU EVERYONE PAST & PRESENT!!!

• EBairead I presume it's Fortran. Well done all. Reply

SpaceSpinner said: I notice that the article says that it has been in space for 35 years. Either I have gone back in time 10 years, or their AI is off by 10 years. V-*ger has been captured!

EBairead said: I presume it's Fortran. Well done all.

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Well, hello, Voyager 1! The venerable spacecraft is once again making sense

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Members of the Voyager team celebrate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory after receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in months. NASA/JPL-Caltech hide caption

Members of the Voyager team celebrate at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory after receiving data about the health and status of Voyager 1 for the first time in months.

NASA says it is once again able to get meaningful information back from the Voyager 1 probe, after months of troubleshooting a glitch that had this venerable spacecraft sending home messages that made no sense.

The Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 probes launched in 1977 on a mission to study Jupiter and Saturn but continued onward through the outer reaches of the solar system. In 2012, Voyager 1 became the first spacecraft to enter interstellar space, the previously unexplored region between the stars. (Its twin, traveling in a different direction, followed suit six years later.)

Voyager 1 had been faithfully sending back readings about this mysterious new environment for years — until November, when its messages suddenly became incoherent .

NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft is talking nonsense. Its friends on Earth are worried

It was a serious problem that had longtime Voyager scientists worried that this historic space mission wouldn't be able to recover. They'd hoped to be able to get precious readings from the spacecraft for at least a few more years, until its power ran out and its very last science instrument quit working.

For the last five months, a small team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California has been working to fix it. The team finally pinpointed the problem to a memory chip and figured out how to restore some essential software code.

"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," NASA stated in an update.

The usable data being returned so far concerns the workings of the spacecraft's engineering systems. In the coming weeks, the team will do more of this software repair work so that Voyager 1 will also be able to send science data, letting researchers once again see what the probe encounters as it journeys through interstellar space.

After a 12.3 billion-mile 'shout,' NASA regains full contact with Voyager 2

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After months of silence, Voyager 1 has returned NASA’s calls

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For the last five months, it seemed very possible that a 46-year-old conversation had finally reached its end.

Since its launch from Kennedy Space Center on Sept. 5, 1977, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft has diligently sent regular updates to Earth on the health of its systems and data collected from its onboard instruments.

But in November, the craft went quiet.

Voyager 1 is now some 15 billion miles away from Earth. Somewhere in the cold interstellar space between our sun and the closest stars, its flight data system stopped communicating with the part of the probe that allows it to send signals back to Earth. Engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in La Cañada Flintridge could tell that Voyager 1 was getting its messages, but nothing was coming back.

“We’re to the point where the hardware is starting to age,” said Linda Spilker, the project scientist for the Voyager mission. “It’s like working on an antique car, from 15 billion miles away.”

Week after week, engineers sent troubleshooting commands to the spacecraft, each time patiently waiting the 45 hours it takes to get a response here on Earth — 22.5 hours traveling at the speed of light to reach the probe, and 22.5 hours back.

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By March, the team had figured out that a memory chip that stored some of the flight data system’s software code had failed, turning the craft’s outgoing communications into gibberish.

A long-distance repair wasn’t possible. There wasn’t enough space anywhere in the system to shift the code in its entirety. So after manually reviewing the code line by line, engineers broke it up and tucked the pieces into the available slots of memory.

They sent a command to Voyager on Thursday. In the early morning hours Saturday, the team gathered around a conference table at JPL: laptops open, coffee and boxes of doughnuts in reach.

At 6:41 a.m., data from the craft showed up on their screens. The fix had worked .

“We went from very quiet and just waiting patiently to cheers and high-fives and big smiles and sighs of relief,” Spilker said. “I’m very happy to once again have a meaningful conversation with Voyager 1.”

Voyager 1 is one of two identical space probes. Voyager 2, launched two weeks before Voyager 1, is now about 13 billion miles from Earth, the two crafts’ trajectories having diverged somewhere around Saturn. (Voyager 2 continued its weekly communications uninterrupted during Voyager 1’s outage.)

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They are the farthest-flung human-made objects in the universe, having traveled farther from their home planet than anything else this species has built. The task of keeping communications going grows harder with each passing day. Every 24 hours, Voyager 1 travels 912,000 miles farther away from us. As that distance grows, the signal becomes slower and weaker.

When the probe visited Jupiter in 1979, it was sending back data at a rate of 115.2 kilobits per second, Spilker said. Today, 45 years and more than 14 billion miles later, data come back at a rate of 40 bits per second.

The team is cautiously optimistic that the probes will stay in contact for three more years, long enough to celebrate the mission’s 50th anniversary in 2027, Spilker said. They could conceivably last until the 2030s.

The conversation can’t last forever. Microscopic bits of silica keep clogging up the thrusters that keep the probes’ antennas pointed toward Earth, which could end communications. The power is running low. Eventually, the day will come when both Voyagers stop transmitting data to Earth, and the first part of their mission ends.

But on the day each craft goes quiet, they begin a new era, one that could potentially last far longer. Each probe is equipped with a metallic album cover containing a Golden Record , a gold-plated copper disk inscribed with sounds and images meant to describe the species that built the Voyagers and the planet they came from.

Erosion in space is negligible; the images could be readable for another billion years or more. Should any other intelligent life form encounter one of the Voyager probes and have a means of retrieving the data from the record, they will at the very least have a chance to figure out who sent them — even if our species is by that time long gone.

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Corinne Purtill is a science and medicine reporter for the Los Angeles Times. Her writing on science and human behavior has appeared in the New Yorker, the New York Times, Time Magazine, the BBC, Quartz and elsewhere. Before joining The Times, she worked as the senior London correspondent for GlobalPost (now PRI) and as a reporter and assignment editor at the Cambodia Daily in Phnom Penh. She is a native of Southern California and a graduate of Stanford University.

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NASA hears from Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, after months of quiet

This illustration provided by NASA depicts Voyager 1. The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data in November 2023. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft’s coding to work around the trouble. In mid-April 2024, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory declared success after receiving good engineering updates. The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data. (NASA via AP)

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CAPE CANAVERAL, Fla. (AP) — NASA has finally heard back from Voyager 1 again in a way that makes sense.

The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data last November. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft’s coding to work around the trouble.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California declared success after receiving good engineering updates late last week. The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data.

It takes 22 1/2 hours to send a signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space. The signal travel time is double that for a round trip.

Contact was never lost, rather it was like making a phone call where you can’t hear the person on the other end, a JPL spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 has been exploring interstellar space — the space between star systems — since 2012. Its twin, Voyager 2, is 12.6 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) away and still working fine.

The Associated Press Health and Science Department receives support from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute’s Science and Educational Media Group. The AP is solely responsible for all content.

NASA re-establishes communication with Voyager 1 interstellar spacecraft that went silent for months

NASA and Voyager 1 are communicating back and forth again, after the most distant human-made object in space stopped sending usable data back to the space agency nearly five months ago.

NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory said Voyager 1, which is more than 15 billion miles away from Earth, stopped sending readable data back to scientists on Nov. 14, 2023, though mission controllers could still see the spacecraft was receiving commands and operating as intended.

The Southern California-based engineering team responsible for Voyager 1 investigated the problem and learned the issue was connected to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, which is called the Flight Data Subsystem (FDS).

The FDS packages the data collected by the spacecraft before sending it back to earth.

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Engineers discovered the chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory was faulty, making the code unusable.

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Had the spacecraft been located on Earth, engineers would be able to go in and replace a chip, but because it is in interstellar space, engineers needed to figure out a way to move the affected code somewhere else in the FDS memory.

The code is so large that there is not a single location to store the entire section of the code. So, engineers divided the affected code into sections and planned to move them to various locations in the FDS.

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Engineers also had to make sure the code worked together as a whole after being moved.

Once the code was reconfigured, engineers transmitted the changes to the FDS memory on April 18.

The signal takes about 22.5 hours to travel through space until it reaches Voyager 1, and then another 22.5 hours for a signal to come back to earth.

VOYAGER 1 DETECTS ‘HUM’ WHILE IN INTERSTELLAR SPACE: REPORT

On April 20, the mission team received a response from Voyager 1 and confirmed the modification worked. As a result, engineers now have the ability to check the health and status of the spacecraft.

In the coming months, the team plans to move and adjust additional portions of the FDS software that was affected, including portions that send scientific data back to mission control.

Voyager 1′s odyssey began in 1977 when the spacecraft and its twin, Voyager 2, were launched on a tour of the gas giant planets of the solar system.

After beaming back dazzling postcard views of Jupiter’s giant red spot and Saturn’s shimmering rings, Voyager 2 hopscotched to Uranus and Neptune . Meanwhile, Voyager 1 used Saturn as a gravitational slingshot to power itself past Pluto. 

Original article source: NASA re-establishes communication with Voyager 1 interstellar spacecraft that went silent for months

Voyager 1: NASA's longest-running spacecraft back in touch with Earth after five months of silence

The Voyager probes are in interstellar space but Voyager 1 stopped sending back usable information in November. After months of work, NASA scientists have now heard back from the spacecraft.

By Mickey Carroll, science and technology reporter

Tuesday 23 April 2024 11:45, UK

NASA's longest-running spacecraft Voyager 1 is sending information back to Earth again for the first time since November.

Scientists have managed to fix a problem on the probe, which was launched 46 years ago, after five months of silence.

On 14 November last year, Voyager 1 stopped sending usable data back to Earth, even though scientists could tell it was still receiving their commands and working well otherwise.

Hi, it's me. - V1 https://t.co/jgGFBfxIOe — NASA Voyager (@NASAVoyager) April 22, 2024

It was first launched alongside its twin, Voyager 2. The pair are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space , which is the space between stars.

The Voyager probes send back never-seen-before information about our galaxy. Since they blasted off in 1977, they have revealed details in Saturn's rings, provided the first in-depth images of the rings of Uranus and Neptune and discovered the rings of Jupiter.

Although their cameras are switched off to conserve power and memory, they are still sending back information that would be impossible to get anywhere else.

With all this data stuck onboard and the spacecraft more than 15 billion miles from Earth, NASA scientists needed to fix the problem remotely.

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The team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California confirmed in March that the issue was with one of Voyager 1's three onboard computers. That computer, called the flight data subsystem, is responsible for packaging the data up before it is sent back to Earth.

Engineers have confirmed that corrupted memory aboard my twin #Voyager1 has been causing it to send unreadable data to Earth. It may take months, but our team is optimistic they can find a way for the FDS to operate normally again: https://t.co/qe5iQUu4Oj https://t.co/AGFBZFz53v — NASA Voyager (@NASAVoyager) April 4, 2024

Within the computer, a single chip containing some of the computer's software code had stopped working. Without that code, the data was unusable.

The engineers couldn't pop over and fix it. Instead, on 18 April, they remotely split the code across different parts of the computer.

Then they had to wait to see if their fix had worked.

It takes around 22-and-a-half hours for a radio signal to reach Voyager 1 and another 22-and-a-half hours for a response to come back.

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On 20 April, the team got good news. For the first time in five months, they were in contact with Voyager 1 again and could check the health and status of the spacecraft.

Now, they'll adjust the rest of the computer so it can begin sending back more data.

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Voyager 2 is working normally and heading towards a star called Ross 248. It'll come within 1.7 light years of it in around 40,000 years.

Voyager 1 will almost reach a star in the Little Dipper constellation in 38,200 years from now.

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April 27, 2024

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NASA hears from Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, after months of quiet

by Marcia Dunn

NASA has finally heard back from Voyager 1 again in a way that makes sense.

The most distant spacecraft from Earth stopped sending back understandable data last November. Flight controllers traced the blank communication to a bad computer chip and rearranged the spacecraft's coding to work around the trouble.

NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Southern California declared success after receiving good engineering updates late last week. The team is still working to restore transmission of the science data.

It takes 22 1/2 hours to send a signal to Voyager 1, more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space . The signal travel time is double that for a round trip.

Contact was never lost, rather it was like making a phone call where you can't hear the person on the other end, a JPL spokeswoman said Tuesday.

Launched in 1977 to study Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 has been exploring interstellar space — the space between star systems — since 2012. Its twin, Voyager 2, is 12.6 billion miles (20 billion kilometers) away and still working fine.

© 2024 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed without permission.

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Russia set to build new space center in Moscow (PHOTOS)

Russia’s new National Space Center is being constructed on the site of the Khrunichev State Space Research and Production Center in western Moscow.

On June 21, the Moscow City Architecture Committee approved the urban planning solution, according to the official website of the Moscow Mayor’s Office.

The tender to develop the architectural concept, announced in October 2019, was won by the Russian design bureau UNK Project.

According to their concept, the main component of the center will be a triangular tower in the form of a 248m-tall rocket, which will house the headquarters of Roscosmos. The facade of the building will be illuminated to create a moving-up effect. And at the base, lighting fixtures will simulate the flame of a rocket booster.

Adjoining the tower will be a long building with research labs and offices. This building will be traversed by a 545m-long central gallery, along which canteens and consumer services will be located.

In addition, the complex will feature open-air museums in U-shaped courtyards, where pieces of aerospace equipment will be suspended in the air via cables between the buildings.

The ceremonial laying of the first stone took place in September 2019, and construction is scheduled to finish by 2022.

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