This is a sort of a lazy post, because all I am going to do is repeat what I read in an article yesterday in the Washington Post. It would be even easier, of course, simply to post a link to that article, but the Post has a paywall and I don’t want you to miss it. So all credit goes to Post reporter Joel Achenbach.

The article, on page 2 of the first section, was titled “NASA unsure how long revived Voyager I can keep exploring deep space.” It contained some of the truly most amazing things I have ever read. And not only that – but I bet that it also contains some of the most amazing things you have ever read.

A little (very little) background. On September 5, 1977, NASA launched the Voyager I spacecraft to explore some of the outer reaches of space. It later launched Voyager II for the same reason. Both have been extraordinarily successful in their missions, and both continue even today traveling further and further from Earth.

When I say traveling further and further from Earth, I mean traveling further and further from Earth. For example, Voyager I is now 15,000,000,000 (that’s 15 billion) miles away. [OK, you need a little context? That means that for every mile away from Earth Voyager I is today, Elon Musk will earn $4 this year. But I digress.]

That means that Voyager I, having photographed Uranus and Neptune and Pluto, has continued on beyond the edge of our solar system. Again for context, if you traveled to Pluto, you would only be 1/3 of the distance Voyager I has traveled so far.

Because Voyager I is so far from the sun, it cannot operate on solar power, but it still is able to perform somewhat because it is powered in part by plutonium, which has a lengthy half life. It also is powered by what the article calls a radioisotope thermoelectric generator. Not surprisingly, I have no idea what that could possibly be, but it seems to work.

The goal of NASA apparently is to continue to obtain some information from Voyager until it’s 50th birthday on September 5, 2027. It appeared, last November, that this goal would not be met. Everything went silent. Voyager I stopped sending back any information.

But leave it to NASA. Here I quote Achenbach: “A ‘tiger team’ of engineers at JPL [The Jet Propulsion Laboratory of NASA in Pasadena] spent the ensuing months identifying the problem – a malfunctioning computer chip – and restoring communication.”

OK, let’s repeat that in our own words. There is this spaceship 15 billion miles away, out of the solar system, which was still sending back information and then it stopped. These NASA folks were able to locate the problem as one malfunctioning computer chip – and fix it.

Now, I looked up a definition of a computer chip at amazon.com, and this is what I got: “A computer chip is a tiny wafer of semiconducting material with an embedded electronic circuit. It contains millions of microscopic electronic components called transistors that transmit data signals.”

I don’t know how many computer chips are in Voyager I, and Voyager I was not transmitting any data back, and it was 15 billion miles away, and nevertheless NASA was not only able to identify the particular problem, but solve it and put the ship back in business.

Of course, even after it stops transmitting data, Voyager I will continue to travel. I now go back and quote the article:

“Voyager I is heading toward the constellation Ophiuchus, according to NASA, and in about 38,000 years, and it will come within 1.7 light years of an unremarkable star near the Little Dipper. But although it will have long gone silent, it does carry the equivalent of a message in a bottle: the “Golden Record”.

“The record was curated by a committee led by astronomer Carl Sagan and includes greetings in 55 languages, sounds of surf, winds and thunderstorms, a whale song and music ranging from Beethoven to Chuck Berry to a Navajo chant. The Golden Record is accompanied by instructions for playing it, should the spacecraft someday come into the hands of an intelligent species interested in finding out about life on Earth…..

“But the advanced spacefaring civilization may not be an alien one, NASA scientists point out. It’s conceivable that the cosmic message in a bottle could be picked up by a human deep-space mission eager to examine a vintage spaceship.”

Enough said. Keep me posted.