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

The Voyager 1 spacecraft has been cruising done the cosmos for 47 years, collecting precious information beyond the star system. All that interstellar travel, however, is taking its toll connected the probe. Recently, NASA engineers had to resoluteness a thruster contented affecting Voyager 1, overcoming a bid of obstacles posed by the probe’s aging hardware.

The wear-and-tear of abstraction question has caused Voyager 1’s thrusters to go clogged. A substance conduit wrong the thrusters has filled up with silicon dioxide, a broadside effect of property wrong the spacecraft’s substance tank. To assistance Voyager 1 proceed its mission, a squad of engineers switched to a antithetic acceptable of thrusters than the 1 the spacecraft had been relying on, NASA precocious announced. Plot twist, that 1 is clogged, too.

Voyager 1 uses its thrusters to constituent itself towards Earth and support connection lines unfastened with crushed control. The spacecraft has 3 sets of thrusters, 2 for cognition propulsion and 1 for trajectory correction maneuvers. During the opening of its mission, Voyager 1 needed the antithetic types of thrusters to transportation retired its planetary flybys, but the spacecraft is present connected a straightforward way retired of the star system, truthful it’s nary longer picky with which 1 it uses.

In 2002, the ngo squad astatine NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory noticed immoderate substance tubes successful the cognition propulsion thruster acceptable were starting to clog. The squad switched to the 2nd cognition propulsion set, but that 1 showed signs of clogging successful 2018, which prompted the engineers to trust connected the trajectory correction thruster set.

Over the past six years, that thruster became adjacent much clogged than the different 2 erstwhile the squad made the switch. The opening of the trajectory correction thruster conduit was primitively 0.01 inches (0.25 millimeters) successful diameter, and present it’s been reduced to 0.0015 inches (0.035 mm), oregon astir fractional the width of a quality hair, according to NASA. As a result, the squad had nary prime but to power backmost to 1 of the 2 cognition propulsion thrusters.

This process of switching thrusters would’ve been casual backmost successful the day, but Voyager 1 is nary outpouring chickenhearted and the spacecraft requires much cautious handling today. Controllers turned disconnected immoderate unnecessary onboard systems, including immoderate heaters. That strategy successfully reduced the spacecraft’s powerfulness usage, but it besides caused Voyager 1 to go colder. As a result, turning connected the unused thrusters risked damaging them, truthful the squad had to lukewarm them up archetypal utilizing the spacecraft’s non-essential heaters.

The dilemma continued, arsenic the spacecraft’s powerfulness proviso is present truthful debased that turning connected the non-essential heaters would necessitate the ngo squad to crook disconnected thing else. Instead, the engineers figured they could crook disconnected the spacecraft’s main heaters for astir an hour, conscionable capable clip to lukewarm up the thruster.

All that effort paid off, and Voyager 1’s needed thruster subdivision was up and running. It’s clear, however, that the aging interstellar probe requires a batch much to support up and running. “All the decisions we volition person to marque going guardant are going to necessitate a batch much investigation and caution than they erstwhile did,” Suzanne Dodd, Voyager’s task manager, said successful a statement.

Voyager 1 launched successful 1977, little than a period aft its duplicate probe, Voyager 2, began its travel to space. The spacecraft took a faster route, exiting the asteroid loop earlier than its twin, and making adjacent encounters with Jupiter and Saturn, wherever it discovered 2 Jovian moons, Thebe and Metis, and 5 caller moons, and a caller ringing called the G-ring, astir Saturn.

Voyager 1 ventured into interstellar abstraction successful August 2012, becoming the archetypal spacecraft to transverse the bound of our star system.The spacecraft is presently 15.14 cardinal miles away (24.4 cardinal kilometers), flying done interstellar abstraction astatine a velocity of 38,000 miles per hr (61,155 kilometers per hour).