NASA restores contact with Voyager 1 after no contact for five months

(NBC, KYMA/KECY) - NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has finally phoned home to ground control after five months of no contact.

Launched over 46 years ago, the interstellar explorer stopped sending intelligible data back to Earth in November of last year.

While mission controllers could tell the spacecraft was still receiving commands and otherwise operating normally, it was later discovered that there was an issue with a single chip in one of the spacecraft's three onboard computers.

Unable to physically repair or replace this chip, the team began sending code to new locations in the Voyager's flight data subsystem (FDS) memory. This proved successful, and on April 20, Voyager 1 updated ground control about its health status.

The next step is to enable the spacecraft to begin returning science data again.