Despite many problems, the aging probe cannot be stopped.
After a bumpy few years, we have good news about NASA’s Voyager 1 mission to share. NASA has successfully switched thrusters on the aging spacecraft from an impressive 24,630,000,000 kilometers (15,310,000,000 miles) away.
Voyager 1 has traveled further than any human-made object, crossing the heliopause and heading into interstellar space. While doing this, it has continued to send back useful data to Earth, helping us learn about the space between stars outside of our own Solar System. All this while working with just 69.63 kilobytes of memory, and running partly on code written in the archaic computer language Fortran 5.
“The button you press to open the door of your car, that has more compute power than the Voyager spacecrafts do,” Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd explained to NPR. “It’s remarkable that they keep flying, and that they’ve flown for 46-plus years.”
In recent years, the spacecraft has begun to show signs of its age. For a time, it began sending back repeating patterns of 1s and 0s, rather than any useful science data. This problem – which turned out to be the result of corrupted memory – has thankfully been fixed with commands sent to the spacecraft. However, Voyager’s problems are not over.
An issue with the probe’s thrusters, which keep the probe pointed at Earth to receive such commands and send back useful data, was found by NASA.
“After 47 years, a fuel tube inside the thrusters has become clogged with silicon dioxide, a byproduct that appears with age from a rubber diaphragm in the spacecraft’s fuel tank,” NASA explained in a statement. “The clogging reduces how efficiently the thrusters can generate force.”
________________
Continues at
