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When we thought we had seen everything from Voyager 1, NASA surprises us with a new feat. The venerable space probe, which has been moving away from the earth almost half a century, has recovered engines that were considered lost since 2024; A crucial repair that arrives just in time.
Miracle? Nothing of the sort. It has been a mixture of ingenuity and risk that allowed NASA engineers Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) Not only promises to exhaust the useful life of the probe, but was made just before the only land antenna capable of sending commands to enter a long maintenance period.
Context. The Voyager 1 probe, launched in 1977 with its twin Voyager 2, is located in the interstellar space, about 25,000 million kilometers from the earth. Traveling almost 56,000 kilometers per hour, to keep your main antenna pointing towards us and being able to send us your data, the ship needs to make subtle orientation settings.
These movements, remember Paraspacial procesthey are of three types: nod (up and down), wink (left and right) and praise. The latter, the “roll” movement, turns the ship on its axis, and is essential to keep a guide star that Voyager uses to orient and calibrates its magnetometer.
They threw the towel. The main propellers of Alabeo de la Voyager 1 stopped working in 2004 for the loss of energy of two small internal heater. Without heater, the fuel of the propellers (hydrazine) is freezing and can cause an explosion in the ship’s nozzle.
At that time, NASA engineers concluded that the ruling was irreparable and decided to move on to the reserve praise, they have been working to guide the ship since then. “They probably did not think that the Voyager would continue to run another 20 years,” Kareem Badaruddin, leader of the Voyager Mission in the JPL, said in a statement.
20 years later. The ducts of the reserve propensors are beginning to obstruct due to hydraction residues. According to NASA estimates, they could be completely blocked this autumn, which would make Voyager 1 lose the ability to control alabeo, making the mission seriously danger.
Given this perspective, the Voyager team began a career to counter to reexamine the 2004 ruling. The suspicion was that a disturbance in the circuits that control the energy supply of the heater had “moved a switch” to the incorrect position. If they could return that switch to their original state, perhaps the heaters would work again and, with them, the alabus thrusters.
A doubly risky plan. It involved lighting the inactive propellants and then trying to fix and restart the heaters. If during this process, the ship’s tracker was too diverted from its guide star, the inactive propellers would firing automatically. And if the heaters were still turned off at that time, an explosion could have occurred.
To top it off, NASA only had a margin until May 4 for a scheduled maintenance of antenna 43 of the deep space network. The 70 -meter antenna, located at the Cambberra station, is the only take a whole day to arrive and another to returnthey played to counterreloj.
Success. In spite of everything, the team sent the necessary commands on March 18. March 20, They received telemetry with the results. For relief and euphoria of the team, at 20 minutes of starting to receive the data, the temperature of the heater increased drastically. The plan had worked.
With this repair, the mission team breathes calmer. If current alabeous propellants are obstructed in the coming months, Voyager 1 may be changed without problems to these newly reactivated propellers and continue working normally.
Image | NASA-JPL
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