Voyager 1 Broke Down 15 Billion Miles Away. NASA Fixed It Anyway.

In November 2023, the most distant machine humans have ever built started talking nonsense. Voyager 1 was still sending a signal — but instead of data, it sent a repeating pattern of ones and zeros. Every question from Earth took almost two days to get an answer, the computer was built in the 1970s, and most of the people who designed it had long retired. This is the story of how a small team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory found one broken chip more than 15 billion miles away, and performed surgery on a 46-year-old computer without ever touching it. Along the way: the Golden Record, a volcano on Io, the choice between Titan and Pluto, the Pale Blue Dot, and the day Voyager 1 becomes one light-day from Earth. Chapters 0:00 Dial Tone 0:36 Silence With a Signal 1:08 A Very Small Team 1:34 Two Robots 2:10 The Golden Record 2:46 The Grand Tour 3:15 A Volcano on Io 3:45 Titan or Pluto 4:18 Pale Blue Dot 4:50 Leaving the Bubble 5:24 The Machine 5:56 Two Days per Question 6:28 The Poke 6:57 One Bad Chip 7:24 An Archaeological Dig 7:50 The Surgery 8:21 Six Forty in the Morning 8:53 Borrowed Time 9:23 One Light Day 9:56 Hello Sources NASA/JPL Voyager mission updates (Dec 2023, Mar 2024, Apr 2024, Jun 2024), NASA Voyager 1 mission page and fact sheet, NSSDC, IEEE Spectrum (May 2024), Scientific American, NPR, NASA "Where are Voyager 1 and 2 now", Smithsonian (Golden Record). Images: NASA/JPL-Caltech. Music and sound: licensed. #Voyager1 #NASA #Space