In a breakthrough discovery, NASA engineers have finally identified the reason behind the indecipherable gibberish being transmitted by the Voyager 1 spacecraft for the past five months. The 46-year-old spacecraft, which has been drifting further from our solar system, experienced a sudden disruption in its regular radio signals back in November 2023, leaving scientists baffled.

To shed light on the issue, NASA engineers sent a command prompt to the Voyager 1 in March, hoping to retrieve data from its flight data subsystem (FDS). After successfully decoding the spacecraft's response, they pinpointed the source of the problem: the FDS's memory has been corrupted.

According to a recent NASA blog post on Wednesday, it is suspected that a single chip responsible for storing a portion of the affected memory in the FDS is not functioning properly. Engineers, at present, cannot definitively determine the cause of the issue. However, there are two potential reasons being considered. First, the chip may have been struck by an energetic particle from space. Second, it is also possible that the chip has simply worn out after 46 years of service.

While finding a workaround may take some time, the engineers are confident that they can rectify the situation and get the FDS back up and running without the faulty chip. This will enable the spacecraft to restore its messaging output and continue transmitting readable information from beyond our solar system.

Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 has flown past Saturn and Jupiter in 1979 and 1980, respectively, before venturing further into interstellar space in 2012. Its primary mission now is to record the conditions outside the sun's protective magnetic field, known as the heliosphere, that envelops our solar system.

Currently located more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) away from Earth, Voyager 1 faces a significant time delay of 22.5 hours for its radio signals to reach our planet. However, the perseverance of NASA's engineers combined with the spacecraft's remarkable resilience continue to pave the way for groundbreaking discoveries in deep space exploration.