Nasa’s Voyager 1, humanity’s most distant emissary, continues to defy expectations. Launched nearly 50 years ago, shortly after its twin Voyager 2, the spacecraft has been hurtling through interstellar space at speeds exceeding 38,000 miles per hour. Despite facing numerous challenges, including dwindling power and communication issues, Voyager 1 has once again demonstrated its resilience.

A Thruster Revival

In a recent update, Nasa revealed that Voyager 1’s mission team successfully revived backup thrusters that had been deemed unusable as 2004. This remarkable feat was achieved through sensitive instructional programming sent from Earth, a testament to the ingenuity and dedication of the engineers involved.

The spacecraft has a second pair of thrusters that were revived in 2018 and 2019,but they’re unable to induce the roll motion that rotates [Voyager 1’s] antenna like a vinyl record to keep each Voyager pointed at a guide star it uses to orient itself, according to Nasa.

The Moment of Truth

The process of sending instructions to Voyager 1 is a delicate and time-consuming endeavor. It took nearly a full day for Nasa to transmit the commands, leaving the mission team in suspense.The team monitored the probe’s thruster temperature,a key indicator of success.

Within 20 minutes, the Earth-bound Voyager team saw that the probe’s thruster temperature had risen just enough to have been successful.

It was such a glorious moment. Team morale was very high that day.

Todd Barber, Voyager propulsion lead

A Miracle Save

The successful revival of the thrusters is considered a significant achievement, especially given their long period of dormancy. Todd Barber, Voyager propulsion lead, emphasized the unexpected nature of the fix:

These thrusters were considered dead. And that was a legitimate conclusion. It’s just that one of our engineers had this insight that maybe there was this other possible cause and it was fixable.

Todd Barber, Voyager propulsion lead

Barber concluded, It was yet another miracle save for Voyager.

Voyager’s Legacy

Voyager 1’s journey has been marked by groundbreaking discoveries, including the detection of new moons and rings around Saturn and Jupiter. Despite facing challenges such as slowly going mad and dying, the probe continues to provide valuable data from interstellar space.

Kareem Badaruddin, the Voyager mission manager at Nasa, explained the initial acceptance of the primary roll thrusters’ failure:

I think at that time, the team was OK with accepting that the primary roll thrusters didn’t work, as they had a perfectly good backup. And, frankly, they probably didn’t think the Voyagers were going to keep going for another 20 years.

Kareem Badaruddin, the Voyager mission manager at Nasa