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Engineers and NASA Let’s say at Nick in time before the planned communication blackout, they revive the Thrusters on Voyager 1, the spaceship farthest from our planet.
The side effect of upgrading to an Earth-based antenna that sends commands to Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2 could have caused a communication pause when the probe faced a serious problem. No operation since 2004, new fixes of the original roll thruster of the vehicle may be useful The veteran spacecraft will continue to operate until they can contact the house again next year.
Used Voyager 1, released in September 1977 Multiple sets of thrusters that work well. The main thrusters allow the spacecraft to be carefully pointed and able to keep its antennas facing the Earth. This allows the probe to send back data collected from a unique perspective 15.5 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space, allowing the Voyager team to receive commands sent.
Within the primary set there are additional thrusters that control the roll of the spacecraft. This leaves Voyager 1 still pointed towards the Guide Star and towards the universe.
If Voyager can’t control the roll motion, the mission can be threatened.
However, as the thrusters ignite, small amounts of propellant residue accumulate over time. So far, engineers have avoided clogging by commanding Voyager 1 to cycle between the original and the backup thruster, as well as the series of thrusters used to modify the trajectory of the spacecraft during the planet Flybee in the 1980s. However, the trajectory thruster does nothing to contribute to the roll of the spacecraft.
The original roll thruster of Voyager 1 stopped working more than 20 years ago after losing power in two internal heaters. In other words, the spacecraft relies on backup roll thrusters and has remained directed at the guide stars ever since.
“I think at the time, the team was OK to accept that the primary roll thruster didn’t work because they had a totally good backup,” said Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager Mission Manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California. “And frankly, they probably didn’t think Voyager would continue for another 20 years.”
Currently, Voyager 1 engineers are concerned that they could become clogged from residue and that the spacecraft’s backup roll thruster could soon be working this fall.
How NASA maintains 47-year-old Voyager Spacecraft
When the heater on the primary roll thruster failed in 2004, the engineers thought it could not be fixed. However, the threat posed by the looming side made the team go back to the drawings and see what was wrong.
The engineers considered that disruption in the circuit controlling the power supply to the heater could cause the switch to be inverted to the wrong position, causing it to turn back to its original position.
But it has not been an easy solution for probes that have been operating far up until now. The spacecraft is now over the Heliosphere, a bubble of particles that extends far beyond the solar magnetic field and particle orbit.
Mission Team I had to take risks by switching Voyager 1 to the primary roll thruster and turning them on before I tried to fix and restart the heater. The heater can only work if the thruster is also on.
If Voyager 1 is too far from the guide star, the spacecraft programming will cause the launch of a roll thruster, but if the heater is not yet on at that moment, the automatic sequence can cause a small explosion.
In addition to the risks, the team that started work earlier this year faced time constraints. The giant Earth-based antenna in Canberra, Australia went offline on May 4th for an upgrade that continues until February 2026. NASA’s deep space network allows agents to communicate with all of the spacecraft, but the Canberra antenna is the only one with enough signal strength to send commands loudly.
“These antenna upgrades are important for future crew members’ lunar landings and will enhance the communication capabilities of science missions in deep space, partly based on discoveries created by Voyager.” “We’ve experienced such downtime before, so we’re just preparing as much as possible.”
The antenna works briefly in August and December, but members of the mission team wanted to order Voyager 1 to test long thrusters before they can no longer communicate with the spacecraft. Thus, if you need to turn on thrusters in August, your team will know if it is a viable option.
On March 20th, the team was waiting for results to return from Voyager 1 after sending The day before commands to the probe activate the thruster and heater. Due to the distance between the two, it takes more than 23 hours for the data to return to Earth from Voyager 1.
If the test fails, Voyager 1 may already be at risk. However, the team looked at the data stream and knew that the temperature on the thruster heater had increased dramatically and that it worked.
“It was a very bright moment. The team was very morale that day,” Todd Barber, the driving force behind the mission at JPL, said in a statement. “These thrusters were considered dead. That was a legitimate conclusion. One of the engineers had this insight that there was this other possible cause and could be corrected. That was another miracle of Voyager.”