Voyager 1 has been navigating obstacles for 46 years, but the iconic spacecraft may be at the end of its spacewalk. NASA is still working through a computer glitch that occurred late last year, and it’s not looking good. In a new interview, Voyager program manager Suzanne Dodd admits that the Jet Propulsion Laboratory team needed a “miracle” to revive the aging explorer.

It’s natural to expect spaceships heading into their 50th birthdays to experience the occasional glitch. Despite everything, NASA has always managed to keep these probes online, even though some major systems and science instruments had to be permanently shut down. However, it is quite difficult to solve this problem. The problem first appeared in November 2023, and by December JPL had tried all the usual fixes, such as turning Voyager 1 off and on and reorienting the antenna.

Although the spacecraft appears to be receiving commands, the Flight Data System (FDS) is not sending the correct data home. A confused stream of ones and zeros means that the command has no data about the current state of the probe. According to Dodd, the team found a problem with the FDS, most likely caused by a flipped or damaged part. However, the lack of telemetry data makes tracking the location of the fault nearly impossible.

Dodd tells Ars Technica that working on Voyager 1’s core systems was akin to an archaeological dig. “I don’t mean to be somber, but a lot of Voyager people died,” Dodd said. “So the people who built the spacecraft are no longer alive. We have pretty good documentation, but most of it is on paper, so you do these archaeological digs to get the documentation.”

Voyager’s flight data system was state-of-the-art at the time of its creation. Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were the first NASA missions to rely on non-volatile memory, and JPL added a backup FDS module to each spacecraft. Unfortunately, Voyager 1’s FDS failed in 1981, leaving it without a hardware backup in 2023. But JPL isn’t giving up. Voyager’s crew normally consists of fewer than a dozen people, but has nearly doubled in size since November as NASA assigned more engineers to work on the problem.

Voyager 1, launched in 1977 a few weeks after its twin Voyager 2, operated admirably for decades with technology that would be considered archaic by today’s standards. With all this, he went where few have gone before. It became the first space probe to leave our solar system in 2012. It would be sad if this miracle did not happen, but NASA still has Voyager 2, which left the solar system in 2018. The probe recently received a new software update that JPL hopes will keep it operational for a while longer.