(NEWSnet) – After waiting through about five months of unreadable data from a decades-old spacecraft, NASA has been able to get Voyager 1 to submit science and engineering data again.

To mark the return of communications, NASA’s communications staff posted “Hi, it’s me” on Voyager’s X platform social media account.

 

NASA’s Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft lay claim to the “longest operating spacecraft in deep space,” having launched in 1977 and since expanded their journeys into interstellar space.

A corrupted memory aboard Voyager 1 resulted in “unreadable data” sent back to Earth, NASA reported. NASA engineers sent a command to the spacecraft to call up its Flight Data Subsystem report, and confirmed that 3% of the memory was corrupted. With that information, engineers sought a way for the system to resume communications using the still-functional memory hardware.

The hardware bypass was confirmed to be successful Monday.

The team’s headquarters is NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in California.

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