Last May, the Jet Propulsion Laboratory ; the rest of the probe worked and continues to function perfectly.
ACS has been successfully monitoring the orientation of the probe for 45 years, i.e., ensuring that all instruments are correctly directed, in particular the antenna, which must always be positioned so that the main electromagnetic radiation petal is oriented towards the Earth to provide communication.
If the data that were taken and generated by ACS were indeed a description of the probe's position, we would not have been able to accept them, or would have received at least a weaker signal, because it would have meant that the antenna was not directed at us. Moreover, none of the systems seemed to have gone into "safe mode", a kind of emergency hibernation. Finally, after these few months, engineers came to the conclusion why these data were so.
The AACS Voyager-1 started sending telemetry data through the onboard computer, which is known to have stopped running many years ago; this damaged computer then accidentally ruined the data, making it meaningless. The solution was very simple: rebooting the system and returning to the original settings, i.e. bypassing and shutting down this damaged computer.
In any case, the mystery of why the AACS computer has made this decision has not yet been disclosed. The hypothesis is that the second computer is being re-activated on the command of another on-board computer, indicating that there are problems that have not yet been detected on board the probe.
The director of the Voyager project, Susanna Dodd, says, "".
So far, the probe is working well, which predicts that it will continue to add to its 40-year record of distance, space time and data sent back to Earth.