In an age when technology is constantly under the threat of being outdated quickly, it borders on amazing that one of the two oldest, active spacecraft has a new lease on life, with Nasa getting the 47-year-old Voyager 1 deep space probe, currently 24bn km and counting away, to send back engineering data for the first time since November 14, 2023, when it developed a glitch.When Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were launched in 1977, they were only expected to operate for five years and check out shortly after their visits to Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus, and Neptune. Instead, their lifespans have extended ten-fold despite flying through the deadly radiation belts of Jupiter and decades of being exposed to cosmic rays and intense cold as they hurtled out of the solar system. The Voyager duo are the only spacecraft to ever fly in interstellar space (the space between stars).Over the years, Mission Control has nursed the Voyagers along in order to extend their service life. Unused systems are shut down and shut down ones are brought back to replace failing ones. There’s also a lot of delicate energy budgeting as the engineers keep a close eye on the nuclear power systems as they inevitably use up their plutonium fuel.Voyager 1 stopped sending readable science and engineering data back to Earth five months ago, even though mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving their commands and otherwise operating normally. In March, the Voyager engineering team at Nasa’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California confirmed that the issue was tied to one of the spacecraft’s three onboard computers, called the flight data subsystem (FDS), responsible for packaging the science and engineering data before it’s sent to Earth.The team discovered that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the FDS memory — including some of the FDS computer’s software code — isn’t working. The loss of that code rendered the science and engineering data unusable. Unable to repair the chip, the team decided to place the affected code elsewhere in the FDS memory. But no single location is large enough to hold the section of code in its entirety.So they devised a plan to divide the affected code into sections and store those sections in different places in the FDS. To make this plan work, they also needed to adjust those code sections to ensure, for example, that they all still function as a whole. Any references to the location of that code in other parts of the FDS memory needed to be updated as well.The team started by singling out the code responsible for packaging the spacecraft’s engineering data. They sent it to its new location in the FDS memory on April 18. A radio signal takes about 22 ½ hours to reach Voyager 1, and another 22 ½ hours for a signal to come back to Earth. 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. During the coming weeks, the team will relocate and adjust the other affected portions of the FDS software. These include the portions that will start returning science data. Caltech in Pasadena, California, manages JPL for Nasa.