Voyager 1 is back

Last week, NASA informed us that NASA’s Voyager 1 Resumes Sending Engineering Updates to Earth:

For the first time since November, NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft is returning usable data about the health and status of its onboard engineering systems.

Launched on 1977, the probe Voyager 1 is currently journeying into interstellar space. Turns out a hardware failure of one of the chips cause it to not return any valid data. But 46 years after it started its journey, the talented engineers at NASA devised a way to make Voyager 1 return engineering data, validating that the system is alive, data that will allow to work around the failure to reprogram the spacecraft so it can send scientific data. This when take 22.5 hours for the signal to reach, thus 45 hours for a round trip.

Meanwhile Voyager 2 is still on its journey.

And most of the 2 year old Android smartphone can’t get a software update…