Touring at 38,000 miles per hour, Voyager 1 is at the moment 15 billion miles away from Earth in interstellar house. Almost 50 years after launch, the spacecraft and its twin have been displaying indicators of its age. Most not too long ago, a gasoline tube clogged up certainly one of Voyager 1’s thrusters that it makes use of to remain oriented towards Earth with a view to transmit scientific knowledge house and obtain instructions from Mission Management. Nevertheless, NASA’s Jet Propulsion Lab have introduced that they’ve efficiently switched the spacecraft over to a special set of thrusters, an exceedingly delicate operation given the gap and age of the expertise.
From NASA:
Switching to totally different thrusters would have been a comparatively easy operation for the mission in 1980 and even 2002. However the spacecraft’s age has launched new challenges, primarily associated to energy provide and temperature. The mission has turned off all non-essential onboard programs, together with some heaters, on each spacecraft to preserve their step by step shrinking electrical energy provide, which is generated by decaying plutonium.
Whereas these steps have labored to scale back energy, they’ve additionally led to the spacecraft rising colder, an impact compounded by the lack of different non-essential programs that produced warmth. Consequently, the angle propulsion thruster branches have grown chilly, and turning them on in that state might injury them, making the thrusters unusable.
The group decided that the best choice could be to heat the thrusters earlier than the change by turning on what had been deemed non-essential heaters. Nevertheless, as with so many challenges the Voyager group has confronted, this introduced a puzzle: The spacecraft’s energy provide is so low that turning on non-essential heaters would require the mission to show off one thing else to supply the warmers enough electrical energy, and every part that is at the moment working is taken into account important.
Learning the difficulty, they dominated out turning off one of many still-operating science devices for a restricted time as a result of there is a threat that the instrument wouldn’t come again on-line. After further examine and planning, the engineering group decided they might safely flip off one of many spacecraft’s major heaters for as much as an hour, liberating up sufficient energy to activate the thruster heaters.
Success! Voyager 1 is once more pointed towards Earth because it continues its ongoing mission to deepen our understanding of the cosmos. And to assist any extraterrestrial civilization acquire an understanding of us, by way of the golden phonograph file connected to every probe containing a narrative of our planet expressed in sounds, pictures, and science.
Beforehand:
• Voyager 1’s unimaginable journey continues after NASA patches code in 46-year-old chip from a distance of 15 billion miles
• Voyager 2 will keep alive years longer due to new energy technique