NASA engine driver have just performed an incredible effort . Voyager 1 is now almost 25 billion klick ( 15 billion land mile ) from Earth , but the mission squad was able-bodied to set up the space vehicle ’s thrusters even though they have not worked since 2004 . They managed to do it before the antenna we communicate with it and its duplicate , Voyager 2 , go offline for months of upgrades .
Since September 5 , 1977,Voyager 1has been roaming through the cosmos . Having make out its master missionary work of accelerator gargantuan observation , it has jaunt farther than any other ballistic capsule before or since . Many of its original factor have been switched off now , though . Some because they are no longer necessary ( like the camera andits iconic last picture ) , while others have stopped working .
Thrusters are very crucial to keep the spacecraft antenna pointing at Earth . The ace that have been revived are backup axial motion thrusters , as the current alive thrusters could stop run this nightfall due to the buildup of residual . Originally , to head off buildup geological formation in the tubes , the mission squad would burn up all of them once in a while , but back in 2004 , the main wheeling thruster had an issue . Two modest intimate heaters lost power . The problem was turn over unfixable .
“ I think at that time , the squad was OK with accepting that the primary gyre thrusters did n’t work , because they had a perfectly good backup , ” Kareem Badaruddin , Voyager mission handler at JPL , which manages the missionary station for NASA , enunciate in astatement . “ And , frankly , they probably did n’t think the Voyagers were give-up the ghost to keep going for another 20 age . ”
With the communication intermission looming ( a nerve - wracking butnecessary process ) from May 4 this year to February 2026 due to upgrades to Deep Space Station 43 , NASA want to make certain that they had all contingency design for . The Deep Space Station 43 is an antenna 70 meter ( 230 foot ) across located in Canberra , Australia , that is part of NASA’sDeep Space internet . It ’s the most powerful of the DSN and the only one that can communicate with the Voyager examine now that they are in interstellar space .
The upcoming pause led the team to review the independent thruster return . They conceive that a disturbance in a circuit might have “ flip a switch ” in the organisation . If they could flip it again with a bid , there was a fortune they ’d run again .
The function was not without risk . The team had to sour on the hibernating main thrusters and then seek to desexualise the heater issue . If by any chance , the reflex arrangement measures a impulsion and enkindle the thruster before the heat , it would have caused an explosion . So the team had to identify the star tracker that measures the position of the wiliness pointed as precisely as possible .
This is a hard job here on Earth , let alone somewhere it take over 23 hours to institutionalise a signal to . Still , the team put to death the manoeuvre and tried to alternate the hummer again , and it work . The main pusher worked again .
“ It was such a brilliant minute . Team morale was very high that day , ” articulate Todd Barber , the mission ’s propulsion lead at JPL . “ These thruster were considered stagnant . And that was a licit conclusion . It ’s just that one of our technologist had this perceptivity that possibly there was this other potential cause and it was fixable . It was yet another miracle save for Voyager . ”
