Zombie Voyager 1 Spacecraft Resurrects Its "Dead" Thrusters Over 15 Billion Miles Away
NASA's Voyager 1, the furthest spacecraft from Earth, simply refuses to die.
In a recent update, the space agency revealed that the little probe that could has once again sputtered back to life thanks to some remote magic done on its thrusters from 15 billion miles away.
Launched nearly 50 years ago, just after its twin craft Voyager 2, the probe has been plummeting through interstellar space for decades at speeds of more than 38,000 miles per hour. Along with discovering new moons and rings on Saturn and Jupiter, Voyager 1 has also been slowly going mad and dying — but NASA is not letting it go down without a fight.
The spacecraft's mission team decided to see if they could fix its thrusters, which have been "deemed unusable" since 2004 and have been relatively dormant ever since.
Notably, the craft does have a second pair of thrusters that were revived in 2018 and 2019, but they're unable to induce the roll motion that "rotates [Voyager 1's] antenna like a vinyl record to keep each Voyager pointed at a guide star it uses to orient itself," per NASA.
When those primary roll thrusters first began to peter out, it wasn't seen as the end of the world.
"I think at that time, the team was OK with accepting that the primary roll thrusters didn't work, because they had a perfectly good backup," explained Kareem Badaruddin, the Voyager mission manager at NASA, in the agency's update. "And, frankly, they probably didn't think the Voyagers were going to keep going for another 20 years."
As the years went by and it became clear that the thrusters could be fixed, NASA began to investigate the issue and found that those primary thrusters could be fired with the help of some very sensitive instructional programming from Earth.
It took nearly a full day for NASA to send its instructions to the probe, so the mission team was mostly left in the dark, so to speak, trying to figure out whether it had worked.
Despite the communication blackout, the Earth-bound Voyager team saw within 20 minutes that the probe's thruster temperature had risen just enough to have been successful — an indication that the gambit paid off.
"It was such a glorious moment," enthused Voyager propulsion lead Todd Barber. "Team morale was very high that day."
"These thrusters were considered dead. And that was a legitimate conclusion," he continued. "It's just that one of our engineers had this insight that maybe there was this other possible cause and it was fixable."
"It was," Barber said, "yet another miracle save for Voyager."
More on unlikely space: Scientists Just Moved Up the Death Date of the Universe
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