22 light-hours away
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The US space agency says its Voyager-1 probe is once again sending usable information back to Earth after months of spouting gibberish.
The 46-year-old Nasa spacecraft is humanity's most distant object.
A computer fault stopped it returning readable data in November but engineers have now fixed this.
For the moment, Voyager is sending back only health data about its onboard systems, but further work should get the scientific instruments back online.
Voyager-1 is more than 24 billion km (15 billion miles) away, so distant, its radio messages take fully 22.5 hours to reach us.
"Voyager-1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems," Nasa said in a statement.
"The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again."
Voyager-1 was launched from Earth in 1977 on a tour of the outer planets, but then just kept going.
It moved beyond the bubble of gas emitted by the Sun - a domain known as the heliosphere - in 2012, and is now embedded in interstellar space, which contains the gas, dust and magnetic fields from other stars.
A corrupted chip has been blamed for the ageing spacecraft's recent woes.
This prevented Voyager's computers from accessing a vital segment of software code used to package information for transmission to Earth.
For a period of time, engineers could get no sense whatsoever out of Voyager, even though they could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally.
The issue was resolved by shifting the affected code to different locations in the memory of the probe's computers.
I wonder how many engineers are still working on the
V'gerVoyager project. -
The ability to send and receive a signal from that distance is just spectacular.
Think about how weak that signal is from that distance.
And a moving target is hitting a moving target, remember they have account for the moment of the earth to catch the signal. Those guys do great work. At one point several years ago part of the Deep Space Network group worked in Northern VA, I attended a briefing one time, that work is fascinating.
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That is just crazy, but in a good way!!!
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Someone asked why hasn't someone hacked it? On reddit:
Well the act of hacking Voyager would be relatively easy. I am sure that you could get a copy of the Voyager protocol to figure out what to send to Voyager to make it do what you want it to do.
The issue is how to send the signal, and where. Voyager 1 and 2 are so far away that not only do you need a very high powered transmission source, but you also need to know exactly where in the sky to send it to.
Which means a motivated hacker would need to:
Learn the protocol (Easy)
Figure out something that they could make Voyager do that would be interesting enough to make it worth it (Harder)
Craft the signal to send (Moderately difficult)
Hack into or otherwise gain access to one of a handful of transmitters who can reach Voyager 1 or 2 (Very difficult)
Point the transmitter at Voyager 1 or 2 without anyone noticing (Staggeringly difficult)
Send the very slow bit-rate message to Voyager 1 or 2 (Easy)
Not get sent to jail for a short blurb on the evening news (Difficult)
Somewhat related:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/International_Cometary_Explorer#ISEE-3_Reboot_Project
my favorite comment:
That's why I store all my data in random locations somewhere within the Oort Cloud.
