NASA engineers complete nail-biting maneuver to resurrect Voyager 1's long-dead thrusters [View all]

[groundloop]

https://www.livescience.com/space/yet-another-miracle-save-nasa-engineers-complete-nail-biting-maneuver-to-resurrect-voyager-1s-long-dead-thrusters



NASA engineers have resurrected Voyager 1's half-century-old thrusters more than 20 years after they fell silent, reviving a crucial backup just months before a planned communications blackout that could have doomed the craft.

The miracle fix has bought precious time for the veteran spacecraft, enabling it to stay in operation until contact with Earth is reestablished next year.

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With the backup thrusters clogging and the antenna blackout looming, NASA engineers decided to turn to drastic measures. The craft's two heater circuits could have died out from a disturbance that flipped the wrong switch, they reasoned; getting them to work again could be as straightforward as changing this switch back.

Yet while flipping a switch sounds simple, doing so remotely on a craft hurtling through interstellar space at around 35,000 mph (56,000 kmh) is significantly less so. The faulty heaters could only be fixed if the thrusters were turned on, but if the thrusters were on and the heaters weren't, any deviation from Voyager 1's course would trigger an automatic sequence to make the thrusters fire — causing the craft to explode.