NASA’s Voyager 1 spacecraft launched into space on September 5, 1977 and has been touring the solar system and beyond for 40 years. For most of that time, the Voyager crew back on Earth has relied on the attitude control thrusters to gently adjust Voyager’s position so that its antenna always pointed at Earth. Those thrusters are starting to degrade, so NASA scientists decided to try another system of thrusters on Voyager that hadn’t been used in 37 years… and they worked perfectly!
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The most exciting part of this story is in the numbers. The Voyager crew had to turn on the thrusters normally used for trajectory control maneuvers (TCM) remotely. According to GeekWire, “The last time the TCM thrusters were fired up was on Nov. 8, 1980, to adjust the probe’s course for its Saturn flyby.” 37 years is a long time and a lot of distance. Voyager 1 left our solar system behind in September of 2012. That meant that the signal to turn on the TCM thrusters had to travel 13.1 BILLION MILES to reach the probe!! And, it took 19 hours and 35 minutes to do it. Voyager ran the test, sent back the signal that the thrusters were successful, and 19 hours and 35 minutes after that, NASA rejoiced. That. Is. Amazing.
Let’s give a very heartfelt slow clap to NASA engineers. They built a spacecraft that has lasted 40 years in space and are able to not only talk to it from 13 billion miles away, but operate its equipment and bring thrusters back on line that have been dormant for three decades!?! I am totally blown away.
The TCM thrusters will be used for attitude control starting in January. When the thrusters start to pull too much energy from the spacecraft, the Voyager team will go back to using the original attitude control thrusters. NASA estimates that using the TCM thrusters will add two to three years to Voyager 1’s lifespan. They’ll be performing a similar test on Voyager’s twin, Voyager 2, soon.
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