Engineers are hopeful that veteran Voyager 1 has turned a corner after spending the past three months laughing at controllers.
NASA hears from Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft from Earth, after months of silence
On March 1, the Voyager team sent a command, called a "poke," to make the probe's Flight Data System (FDS) try some other sequences in its software, hoping to bypass whatever had become corrupt.
Readers of a certain vintage will no doubt have memories of poke sheets for various 1980s games. Not that this hack ever used a poke to get infinite lives in Jet Set Willy, of course.
While Voyager 1's lifespan is not infinite, it has endured much longer than expected and may be about to dodge another bullet. On March 3, the mission team saw something different in the stream of data returned from the spacecraft, which had been unreadable since December.
