The Week - Junior

Distant spacecraft is back in touch

Voyager 1, which is floating in space billions of miles from Earth, has started to communicat­e with US space agency NASA once again after months of silence. The spacecraft’s computer software stopped working in November 2023 but engineers on Earth have managed to fix it.

Voyager 1 launched into space in 1977, around the same time as another spacecraft called Voyager 2. The pair were designed to study Jupiter, Saturn, Uranus and Neptune. Voyager 1’s discoverie­s have included finding active volcanoes on the surface of one of Jupiter’s moons, Io. It also observed five new moons around Saturn.

Voyager 1 and 2 completed their missions in 1989 but the two craft continue to explore the universe. In 2012, Voyager 1 left the solar system and entered interstell­ar space, which is the space between stars. It is now more than 15 billion miles away from Earth, making it the most distant object launched into space by humans.

Usually, a radio message from Voyager 1 takes 22.5 hours to reach Earth. Last November, the spacecraft stopped sending readable informatio­n.

One of the computer’s chips, which contained code (instructio­ns for the software to run), had stopped working. Luckily it could still receive commands, so engineers could fix the problem from Earth. They moved the code from the broken chip and stored it in another part of the computer. Then they rewrote some of the moved code so it could work properly again. On 20 April, the engineers found out that their fix had worked. Voyager 1 is now sending back informatio­n about the health and status of its systems. The next step is to get the rest of the computer working again so it can carry on taking scientific readings as it travels through space. NASA scientists hope that the Voyager 1 and 2 spacecraft will keep sending useful data back to Earth for some time. However, in about 10 years, both could be too far away to communicat­e.

Scientists think they have found a new treatment that could prevent people from having asthma attacks.

Asthma is a condition that affects the passages that carry air in and out of the lungs. People with it often have sensitive, inflamed (swollen) airways, which causes wheezing, coughing or feeling breathless. The inflammati­on restricts how much oxygen gets into their lungs. At the moment there is no cure for asthma but treatments like inhalers expand the airways in the lungs so they let more oxygen through.

Scientists have recently been testing a chemical called gadolinium. Early results show it can reduce the damage to airways by up to 80%. This damage makes future asthma attacks more likely, so gadolinium could be an important tool in preventing or stopping them. It also reduced how much mucus (a sticky liquid) lungs produced in an asthma attack. This in turn made airways less swollen.

Asthma affects 5.4 million people in the UK, including 1.1 million children. So far, gadolinium has only been tested on mice but scientists want to try it on humans to see if it has the same effect.