Engineers replaced the spacecraft’s jammed engines while it traveled through interstellar space.
For 47 years, Voyager 1 has collected valuable data beyond the solar system. All that interplanetary travel is wearing out the probe. As Voyager 1’s hardware aged, NASA engineers had to overcome many challenges to fix its thruster.
Voyager 1’s engines are jammed by interstellar travel. Due to aging in the spacecraft’s fuel tank, silicon dioxide has filled a thruster fuel tube. NASA reported that engineers turned on a new set of thrusters to assist Voyager 1 continue its journey. Plot twist: it’s clogged too.
Voyager 1 utilizes thrusters to orient toward Earth and communicate with ground control. The spacecraft contains two attitude propulsion thrusters and one trajectory correction thruster. Voyager 1 used to utilize various thrusters for its planetary flybys, but now that it’s on a straight route out of the solar system, it doesn’t care.
NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory mission crew found clogged fuel tubes in the attitude propulsion thruster set in 2002. In 2018, the second attitude propulsion set started clogging, thus the engineers moved to the trajectory correction thruster set.
After six years, that thruster grew further congested than the other two when the crew switched. NASA said the trajectory correction thruster tube aperture has been lowered from 0.01 inches (0.25 mm) to 0.0015 inches (0.035 mm), approximately half the width of a human hair. Thus, the crew had to use one of the two attitude propulsion thrusters again.
Back then, swapping thrusters was straightforward, but Voyager 1 is now more fragile and required more care. Controllers disabled superfluous onboard systems, including heaters. That method cut power utilization but cooled Voyager 1. Since turning on the unused thrusters may damage them, the crew had to warm them up using the spacecraft’s non-essential heaters.
As the spacecraft’s power supply dwindled, the mission crew had to switch off something to turn on the non-essential heaters. Instead, engineers thought they could switch off the spacecraft’s primary heaters for an hour to reheat the thruster.
All that work paid off when Voyager 1’s thruster branch started working. Clearly, the old interstellar spacecraft needs more to operate. “All the decisions we will have to make going forward are going to require a lot more analysis and caution than they once did,” Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd said.
Within a month after Voyager 2, Voyager 1 launched in 1977. The spacecraft left the asteroid belt sooner than its twin and approached Jupiter and Saturn, where it found two Jovian moons, Thebe and Metis, and five new moons and the G-ring circling Saturn.
First to traverse our solar system, Voyager 1 entered interstellar space in August 2012.The spacecraft is 15.14 billion miles (24.4 billion kilometers) distant and traveling at 38,000 mph in interstellar space.
Time and distance from Earth are making the mission tougher. Voyager 1 recovered from a communication issue earlier this year after months of providing ground control useless data. Voyager 1 admirers celebrated the spacecraft’s homecoming, but engineers soon faced a new dilemma. NASA doesn’t want to end the project, even if it’s becoming tougher.
CREDIT: Allneeds, GIZMODO
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