From more than 15 billion miles away, NASA engineers last April began repairing a space probe that is headed to the constellation of Ophiucus, though it won't arrive for some 38,000 years. NASA launched Voyager 1 in 1977 and it has already outlived expectations, but the space agency hopes to continue receiving data from the probe until at least 2030. Yet after Voyager 1 experienced a computer glitch in November, it began transmitting incomprehensible data (which isn't entirely unusual for it), prompting NASA to initiate those long-distance fixes.
After some uncertainty if any of it would work, the repairs succeeded. Even better, when Salon spoke with NASA about the problem of fixing distance spacecraft, the experts were optimistic about its future and what it says about space exploration in general.
