The team had to revive a thruster used for roll control whose heaters had failed in 2004. The tubes of the backup thrusters currently in use are getting clogged and may fail this year.
The delicate operation required turning on the failed thruster and flipping a switch to enable its heater and 🤞
All very tricky and risky operations, performed from 23 light-hours away on 1970’s era hardware.
That is absolutely wild to me.
That is like sending an update to your phone, and if it fails, you’ll never have a phone again for the rest of your life, and you won’t find out if it succeeded for moments shy of two full days.
https://eyes.nasa.gov/apps/solar-system/#/home
I had no idea NASA had a visualization like this for us. Voyager 1 + 2 are magnificent.
That really puts it into perspective on how far they’ve gone. Good find. Very neat.
I’m getting some space version of thalassophobia from this.
We are . . : : A D R I F T : : . .
and i thought eeloo was far??
Oh also, the reason the vibrate option didn’t work is because you pushed a button in 2004 that changed something in an invisible menu.
“so, if we push this button, either we lose the singal for 9 months, or it literally explodes”
I’m reading it as the 9-month loss of signal being due to construction at the ground station (DSN Canberra), not anything to do with the spacecraft itself.
~172.5x as far away from the earth as the sun
Voyager 1 is a space probe launched by NASA on September 5, 1977, as part of the Voyager program to study the outer Solar System and the interstellar space beyond the Sun’s heliosphere. It was launched 16 days after its twin, Voyager 2. It communicates through the NASA Deep Space Network (DSN) to receive routine commands and to transmit data to Earth. Real-time distance and velocity data are provided by NASA and JPL. At a distance of 167.34 AU (25.0 billion km; 15.6 billion mi) from Earth as of February 2025, it is the most distant human-made object from Earth. The probe made flybys of Jupiter, Saturn, and Saturn’s largest moon, Titan. NASA had a choice of either conducting a Pluto or Titan flyby; exploration of the moon took priority because it was known to have a substantial atmosphere. Voyager 1 studied the weather, magnetic fields, and rings of the two gas giants and was the first probe to provide detailed images of their moons. Wikipedia
If roll thrusters fired because the star tracker drifted and if the heater was still off, then an explosion would destroy Voyager 1.
That is some high stakes remote maintenance. I don’t want to imaging the stress for everybody involved. The relief when they finally got a signal two days later confirming the craft was still in obe piece and the heater was on must have been immense. I get stressed enough waiting minutes for a remote server to come back up.
DSN Canberra upgrade will cause loss of comms until Feb 2026
Oh great, another stressful wait!
I get stressed enough waiting minutes for a remote server to come back up.
Shit… it taking longer than usual, it’s never this long… f5 f5 f5, oh fuck what did I do… oh there it is!
^ Me. EVERY time. “OK. OK. Just got to the bathroom, grab a beer, give it a minute…”
F5, F5, F5, thank god.
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