NASA Pulls Off Delicate Thruster Swap, Preserving Voyager 1 Mission Alive

The Voyager 1 spacecraft has been cruising via the cosmos for 47 years, accumulating valuable information past the photo voltaic system. All that interstellar journey, nonetheless, is taking its toll on the probe. Not too long ago, NASA engineers needed to resolve a thruster challenge affecting Voyager 1, overcoming a collection of obstacles posed by the probe’s ageing {hardware}.

The wear and tear-and-tear of area journey has prompted Voyager 1’s thrusters to turn out to be clogged. A gas tube contained in the thrusters has crammed up with silicon dioxide, a aspect impact of age throughout the spacecraft’s gas tank. To assist Voyager 1 proceed its mission, a group of engineers switched to a distinct set of thrusters than the one the spacecraft had been counting on, NASA lately announced. Plot twist, that one is clogged, too.

Voyager 1 makes use of its thrusters to level itself in the direction of Earth and maintain communication strains open with floor management. The spacecraft has three units of thrusters, two for angle propulsion and one for trajectory correction maneuvers. Through the starting of its mission, Voyager 1 wanted the several types of thrusters to hold out its planetary flybys, however the spacecraft is now on a simple path out of the photo voltaic system, subsequently it’s not choosy with which one it makes use of.

In 2002, the mission group at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory observed some gas tubes within the angle propulsion thruster set had been beginning to clog. The group switched to the second angle propulsion set, however that one confirmed indicators of clogging in 2018, which prompted the engineers to depend on the trajectory correction thruster set.

Over the previous six years, that thruster grew to become much more clogged than the opposite two when the group made the change. The opening of the trajectory correction thruster tube was initially 0.01 inches (0.25 millimeters) in diameter, and now it’s been diminished to 0.0015 inches (0.035 mm), or about half the width of a human hair, in response to NASA. Consequently, the group had no alternative however to modify again to one of many two angle propulsion thrusters.

This process of switching thrusters would’ve been straightforward again within the day, however Voyager 1 is not any spring rooster and the spacecraft requires extra cautious dealing with at this time. Controllers turned off some pointless onboard techniques, together with some heaters. That technique efficiently diminished the spacecraft’s energy utilization, but it surely additionally prompted Voyager 1 to turn out to be colder. Consequently, turning on the unused thrusters risked damaging them, so the group needed to heat them up first utilizing the spacecraft’s non-essential heaters.

The dilemma continued, because the spacecraft’s energy provide is now so low that turning on the non-essential heaters would require the mission group to show off one thing else. As a substitute, the engineers figured they may flip off the spacecraft’s principal heaters for about an hour, simply sufficient time to heat up the thruster.

All that effort paid off, and Voyager 1’s wanted thruster department was up and operating. It’s clear, nonetheless, that the ageing interstellar probe requires much more to maintain up and operating. “All the choices we must make going ahead are going to require much more evaluation and warning than they as soon as did,” Suzanne Dodd, Voyager’s challenge supervisor, mentioned in an announcement.

Voyager 1 launched in 1977, lower than a month after its twin probe, Voyager 2, started its journey to area. The spacecraft took a quicker route, exiting the asteroid belt sooner than its twin, and making shut encounters with Jupiter and Saturn, the place it found two Jovian moons, Thebe and Metis, and 5 new moons, and a brand new ring referred to as the G-ring, round Saturn.

Voyager 1 ventured into interstellar area in August 2012, turning into the primary spacecraft to cross the boundary of our photo voltaic system.The spacecraft is currently 15.14 billion miles away (24.4 billion kilometers), flying via interstellar area at a pace of 38,000 miles per hour (61,155 kilometers per hour).