Once the “death” thruster on the farthest spacecraft on Earth begins to act again
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NASA engineers said they have successfully restored the thruster on Voyager 1, the farthest spacecraft from our planet, some time before the planned communications outage.
Side effects of upgrading to Earth-based antennas that send commands to Voyager 1 and its twin Voyager 2, communication pauses may occur when the investigation encounters a critical issue (thruster failure), which can happen. New fixes for the vehicle’s original rolling thruster since 2004 may help keep senior spacecraft running until they can contact home again next year.
Voyager 1 was launched in September 1977 and used multiple sets of thrusters to operate properly. The main thruster is carefully directed to the spacecraft so that it can keep its antenna facing the earth. This ensures that the probe can send back the data it collects from its unique perspective, which is 15.5 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) in interstellar space and receives commands sent by the Voyager team.
Within the main group are other thrusters that control the spacecraft’s roll, which allows Voyager 1 to keep the pointing guide star so that it can remain in the direction in space.
If Voyager cannot control its scrolling action, it may threaten the task.
However, as the thruster fires, a small amount of propellant residue has accumulated over time. So far, engineers have been circulating between its original and backup thrusters by directing Voyager 1 to avoid clogging and used to change the trajectory of the spacecraft during planetary flights in the 1980s. However, the trajectory thruster does not help roll the spacecraft.
Voyager 1’s original dice roll thrust stopped working more than two decades after it was lost in two internal heaters, meaning the spacecraft has been relying on backup rolling thrusters and has been pointing to the mentoring stars ever since.
“I think at that time the team could accept the main rolling thrusts that didn’t work because their backups were really good,” Kareem Badaruddin, NASA’s Voyager Mission manager at Jet Propuls Labs in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. “And, frankly, they probably don’t think travelers will be in another 20 years.”
Now, Voyager 1 engineers worry that clogging from residues could cause spacecraft’s backup rolling thrusters to stop working immediately after this fall – they must become creative and venture to recover the long-term extinction of the main rolling thrusters.
Secure broken equipment in space
When heaters on major rolling thrusters failed in 2004, engineers thought they could not be fixed. But due to the imminent threat of clogging, the team returned to the drawing board to see what went wrong.
Engineers believe that interference in the circuit controlling the heater power transfers the switch to the wrong position – flipping it into its original position may restart the heater, which in turn reboots the main rolling thrust.
However, this is not a straightforward solution for detectors operating at long distances. The spacecraft currently goes beyond the Earth’s layer, which are the solar bubbles of magnetic fields and particles that extend beyond Pluto’s orbit.
The task team had to take the risk by switching Voyager 1 to its main scrolling thruster and turning it on before trying to fix and restart the heater. The heater can only work if the thruster is also turned on.
If Voyager 1 deviates too far from its guide star, the spacecraft’s programming will trigger a rolling thruster launch – but if the heater isn’t on at that time, the automatic sequence may trigger a small explosion.
Nail test
Apart from the risk, the team started working earlier this year and faced time constraints. A giant Earth-based antenna in Canberra, Australia, was launched on May 4 for an upgrade, which will continue until February 2026. NASA’s deep space network enables the agency to communicate with all its spacecraft – but its Canberra antenna is the only one with enough signal strength to send commands to the Voyager probe.
“These antenna upgrades are critical for future captain landings, and they also improve our communication capabilities in scientific missions in deep space, some of which are based on the discovery of Voyager manufacturing,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager and director of Plannetary Network of JPL, NASA’s Deep Space Network in a Satha in AnaSa, the network’s spatial network. “We’ve experienced downtime like this before, so we’re preparing as much as possible.”
While the antenna will be operated briefly in August and December, mission team members hope to direct Voyager 1 to test its long-term thruster before they can communicate with the spacecraft. That way, if they need to turn on the thruster in August, the team will know if this is a viable option.
On March 20, the team waited to return results from Voyager 1 after sending commands to the survey the day before to activate the thruster and heater. Due to the distance distance between the two, it takes more than 23 hours to return data from Voyager 1 to Earth.
If the test fails, Voyager 1 may be in danger. But the team watched the data stream, showing the temperature of the thruster heater was rising sharply and knew it had worked.
“It was a glorious moment that day. The morale of the team was high that day,” Mission’s director of propulsion at JPL Todd Barber said in a statement. “These thrusters are considered dead. It’s a reasonable conclusion. It’s just one of our engineers who knows something about it, and maybe there are other possible reasons, and it can be solved. This is another miracle of Voyager.”
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