As it turns out, spacecraft aren’t immune to age. In November 2023, NASA’s over 46-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft started sending a stream of nonsense to Earth, spewing out signals without any morsel of meaning. The nonsense continued for more than five months, with members of the Voyager 1 mission team rushing to resolve the issue.
In April 2024, NASA announced that the aging spacecraft is finally returning meaningful messages. But despite this recent resolution, the breakdown in communication itself is still a concern, casting doubts on the durability of the probe and about why its systems are so prone to problems — a product, it seems, of the passage of time.
Read More: The Best of Voyager: The Longest-Running Space Mission in History
