Cav's Place

The announcement that Voyager 1 is once again returning usable data is a piece of good news that comes from pretty much as far as any news could possibly come from. It took some tricky reprogramming, but after the cause of the problem was identified, the team worked things out and, while more work is needed before science data will also be returned once again and I wonder whether anything will need to be sacrificed because of the corrupted part of the memory, the chances of humanity’s most distant functional spacecraft making more discoveries are now looking much better. And the fact that Voyager 1 is now 22.5 light hours away makes me think of the moment when it’ll reach a distance of one light day, which should happen in 2027… Which is also when it’ll turn 50, so that year will mark huge milestones, and I’m sure that the team will make every effort to give it every chance to still be operational at that point, even if power constraints will most probably require at least one more science instrument to be turned off by then.
Of course, this doesn’t change anything about the fact that there are no replacements and what that says about humanity’s focus and ambitions… But I keep mentioning this whenever I write about space exploration, and sometimes not only then, so I’ll leave it at that for now, so this post will just be about the good news, and about something to look forward to.