NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has been in space for nearly 50 years, enduring the grim environment of outer space, while the team on the ground has found ways to prevent its aging hardware from crashing. To keep Voyager alive, engineers managed to bring the spacecraft's old thruster back to life after decades of unusable use.
The space agency revealed this week that NASA engineers have restored a set of thrusters on the Voyager 1 spacecraft backed up while the missions are offline to continuously upgrade to the upgrade of broadcast antennas used to communicate with deep space missions. Voyager's main dice roll thruster stopped working in 2004 after losing power in two small internal heaters, but the team managed to restart the thrust, while the spacecraft drove through interstellar space at a distance of 15.14 billion miles (24.4 billion kilometers).
Voyager 1 was launched in 1977 and its twin probe Voyager 2 started its space journey in less than a month. The dual spacecraft rely on a set of major thrusters that move them toward the planet so that they can send data and receive commands. The main thruster adjusts the direction of the spacecraft (slits and yaws), while a separate thruster controls its rolling. These thrusters (a set of primary and spare units) secure the spacecraft’s antennas like vinyl records, allowing each traveler to point at the stars they use to direct themselves in space.
Engineers switch between the spacecraft's primary and backup thrusters to prevent them from clogging, but the Voyager 1's primary rolling thruster broke 20 years ago and the spacecraft has relied entirely on its backup thrusters ever since.
“I think at the time, the team could accept the main rolling thrusts that didn't work because their backups were very good,” Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager Mission manager at NASA's JET PREPULS lab, said in a statement. “And, frankly, they probably don't think the travelers would be in another 20 years.”
Twenty years later, the traveler continued the truck, so the team decided to re-fix the Voyager 1's main rolling thruster. The engineers behind the mission need to complete the 230-foot-wide (70-meter-wide) antenna in Canberra, Australia (NASA's Deep Space Network part) will begin upgrading. The pause in communication will continue until February 2026, with short-term operations in August and December. This special radio antenna is the only dish with sufficient signal power to send commands to the traveler.
It's a long silence, and the mission engineer needs to make sure Voyager 1 himself can. If the backup rolling thruster fails during this period, the spacecraft will face significant challenges that may terminate the mission. For example, a dormant thruster can be automatically launched, and if the spacecraft is always distanced, a small explosion is triggered.
The team must revisit issues that could cause the main rolling thrust to stop working. “They began to suspect that unexpected changes or interference occurred in the circuit that controlled the heater's power supply effectively turned to the wrong position,” NASA wrote. “If they could return the switch to their original position, the heaters might work again, allowing them to reactivate the main rolling power, and use them if the backup rolling thrusters used since 2004 would be completely clogged.”
On March 20, the main roll thrust restarted after a long vacation. “These thrusts are considered dead. This is a reasonable conclusion,” JPL's director of propulsion Todd Barber said in a statement. “It's just one of our engineers who has this insight, and maybe there are other possible reasons, and it can be solved. This is another miracle of Voyager.”
The Voyager probe is the first spacecraft to travel across interstellar space and has explored unfamiliar areas for nearly 48 years. During the Flybirds of Jupiter and Saturn, Voyager 1 contributed to the discovery of moons including Thebe and Metis, as well as new rings around Saturn. Before continuing to explore the icy giants Uranus and Neptune, NASA launched Voyager 2 on the trajectory of natural gas giants Jupiter and Saturn in the solar system.
All travels have caused losses to the farthest man-made objects, and the days of the spacecraft have been numbered. The traveler is driven by the rotting p, which converts it into electricity. Each year, aging spacecraft loses about 4 watts of power. To protect power, the mission team has shut down any systems deemed unnecessary, including some scientific tools. Through the current energy sustainability program, NASA engineers believe that the dual spacecraft can continue to operate until the 2030s, just to make it surpass the golden anniversary of space.
