Latest news with #KareemBadaruddin
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Business Standard
19-05-2025
- Science
- Business Standard
NASA reboots Voyager 1 thrusters after 20 years-24 billion kilometers away
NASA's Voyager 1 spacecraft has been in space for nearly five decades, enduring the harsh environment of outer space. In the latest development, the team at the US space agency managed to restart a thruster believed to have stopped working back in 2004 after losing power in two small internal heaters. Voyager 1, currently cruising through interstellar space at a distance of 15.14 billion miles (24.4 billion kilometres) from Earth, was launched in 1977. Its twin probe, Voyager 2, followed a month later. Both spacecraft are travelling at speeds of around 35,000 miles per hour through interstellar space. Voyagers rely on thrusters Both spacecraft rely on a set of primary thrusters to control their orientation and keep their antennas pointed towards Earth so they can transmit data and receive commands. The main thrusters on the spacecraft are responsible for adjusting its pitch and yaw, while different thrusters handle its roll. These thrusters—both primary and backup—rotate the spacecraft in a way similar to how a vinyl record spins, ensuring that each Voyager stays aligned with a reference star used for navigation in space. A third set of thrusters, primarily used during planetary flybys, was brought back online in 2018 and 2019. However, these are not capable of managing roll adjustments—critical for maintaining communication with Earth. Primary thruster failure and the backup strategy Engineers have long managed the clogged tubes of the Voyagers by switching between primary, backup, and trajectory thrusters. Voyager 1's primary roll thruster stopped functioning in 2004 after its internal heaters failed. At the time, the team deemed the issue unfixable and opted to rely on the backup roll thrusters to keep the spacecraft aligned. Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at JPL (Jet Propulsion Laboratory), which manages the mission for NASA, said, '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.' He added, 'And frankly, they probably didn't think the Voyagers were going to keep going for another 20 years.' Journey of Voyager 1 thrusters' revival The inability to control roll motion recently posed a major threat to the mission. This prompted the team to revisit the 2004 thruster failure. While investigating, engineers discovered that an unexpected disturbance in the circuit controlling the heaters' power supply had flipped a switch to the wrong position. If they could return it to its original state, the heater might function again—allowing them to reactivate the primary roll thruster in case the backup system, in use since 2004, became fully clogged. Restart under a tight timeline Restarting the heater wasn't easy—it required complex troubleshooting. The team had to work on the dormant roll thrusters and attempt to reactivate the heater. During this process, if the star tracker drifted too far from the guide star, the long-dormant roll thrusters would have automatically fired, thanks to their programming. If the heaters were still off when the thrusters activated, it could have triggered a small explosion. Precision was crucial—the team had to get the star tracker pointed as accurately as possible. One antenna could save the day Despite the time pressure, the team managed to accomplish this feat. From May 4, 2025, through February 2026, the Deep Space Station 43 (DSS-43)—a 230-foot-wide (70-meter-wide) antenna in Canberra, Australia—will undergo upgrades and remain offline for most of that period, except for brief windows in August and December. NASA's Deep Space Network consists of three ground-based facilities—located in Goldstone (California), Madrid (Spain), and Canberra—strategically placed to ensure constant contact with distant spacecraft as the Earth rotates. However, DSS-43 is the only antenna powerful enough to send commands to the Voyagers. Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager and director of the Interplanetary Network at JPL, which oversees the Deep Space Network for NASA, said, 'These antenna upgrades are important for future crewed lunar landings, and they also increase communications capacity for our science missions in deep space, some of which are building on the discoveries Voyager made.' She added, 'We've been through downtime like this before, so we're just preparing as much as we can.' Long shot pays off The team watched as the spacecraft executed their commands on March 20. Because of its distance, it takes more than 23 hours for the message to travel from the spacecraft to Earth, which means whatever the team is watching had occurred almost a day earlier. In case the test had failed, the Voyager might already have been in danger. However, within 20 minutes, the team saw the thruster heaters temperature rising dramatically knowing that they had succeeded. Todd Barber, the mission's propulsion lead at JPL, said, 'It was such a glorious moment. Team morale was very high that day.' 'These thrusters were considered dead. And that was a legitimate conclusion. 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 yet another miracle save for Voyager,' Barber added.
Yahoo
17-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
'Yet another miracle save': NASA engineers complete nail-biting maneuver to resurrect Voyager 1's long-dead thrusters
When you buy through links on our articles, Future and its syndication partners may earn a commission. 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. Launched in 1977, Voyager 1 is currently more than 15 billion miles (24 billion kilometers) from Earth. As such, it takes 23 hours for any radio signal to travel from the craft to our planet. But the Earth-based antenna that sends these commands to Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, is due an upgrade. And the craft's backup thrusters, which keep it locked on a course to a reference star that keeps it oriented toward and in contact with Earth, have been slowly clogging up with propellant residue. These backup thrusters have been used since 2004, when two heater circuits that warm hydrazine fuel for ignition in its main thrusters conked out. "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," Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, said in a statement. "And, frankly, they probably didn't think the Voyagers were going to keep going for another 20 years." But Voyager 1 did keep going, flying out into interstellar space in 2012. It is currently recording the conditions outside of the sun's protective magnetic field, or heliosphere, which blankets our solar system. Related: NASA engineers discover why Voyager 1 is sending a stream of gibberish from outside our solar system 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. Additional time pressure also came from Deep Space Station 43, a gigantic 230-foot-wide (70 meter) antenna in Canberra, Australia, that forms one third of NASA's Deep Space Network. This antenna is the only station with enough signal power to send Voyager commands. RELATED STORIES —NASA hears 'heartbeat' signal from Voyager 2 probe a week after losing contact —Historic space photo of the week: Voyager 2 spies a storm on Saturn 42 years ago —NASA reestablishes full contact with Voyager 2 probe after nail-biting 2-week blackout But the station went offline on May 4 until February 2026 to undergo upgrades. The dish will temporarily come online again in August and December, but as Voyager 1's backup thrusters could be completely clogged by then, the engineers needed to know if the primary thrusters could work again before that time. On March 20, the team fired out the signal, waiting a nail-biting 46 hours before it reached Voyager and a return signal came back. After this time, data began to stream back from the craft showing that the thruster heaters were warming up dramatically — the fix had worked. "It was such a glorious moment," Todd Barber, the mission's propulsion lead at JPL, said in the statement. "Team morale was very high that day. These thrusters were considered dead. And that was a legitimate conclusion. 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 yet another miracle save for Voyager." As both Voyagers continue on their endless journeys, their instruments are slowly shutting down and their power reserves are depleting. This makes their demise inevitable, but not for a little while longer, at least.
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
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
CNN
15-05-2025
- Science
- CNN
Once ‘dead' thrusters on the farthest spacecraft from Earth are in action again
Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. CNN — Engineers at NASA say they have successfully revived thrusters aboard Voyager 1, the farthest spacecraft from our planet, in the nick of time before a planned communications blackout. A side effect of upgrades to an Earth-based antenna that sends commands to Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, the communications pause could have occurred when the probe faced a critical issue — thruster failure — leaving the space agency without a way to save the historic mission. The new fix to the vehicle's original roll thrusters, out of action since 2004, could help keep the veteran spacecraft operating until it's able to contact home again next year. Voyager 1, launched in September 1977, uses more than one set of thrusters to function properly. Primary thrusters carefully orient the spacecraft so it can keep its antenna pointed at Earth. This ensures that the probe can send back data it collects from its unique perspective 15.5 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space, as well as receive commands sent by the Voyager team. Within the primary set are additional thrusters that control the spacecraft's roll, which enables Voyager 1 to remain pointed at a guide star so it can remain oriented in space. If Voyager can't control its roll motion, the mission could be threatened. But as the thrusters fire, tiny amounts of propellant residue have built up over time. So far, engineers have managed to avoid clogging by commanding Voyager 1 to cycle between its original and backup thrusters for orientation, as well as a set of thrusters that were used to change the spacecraft's trajectory during planetary flybys in the 1980s. The trajectory thrusters, however, do nothing to contribute to the spacecraft's roll. Voyager 1's original roll thrusters stopped working more than two decades ago after power was lost in two internal heaters, which means the spacecraft has been relying on the backup roll thrusters to remain pointed at a guide star ever since. '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,' said Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement. 'And, frankly, they probably didn't think the Voyagers were going to keep going for another 20 years.' Now, Voyager 1 engineers are concerned that clogging from the residue could cause the spacecraft's backup roll thrusters to stop working as soon as this fall — and they had to get creative, as well as take risks, to revive the long-defunct primary roll thrusters. How NASA keeps its 47-year-old Voyager spacecraft going 02:14 • CNN Business Fixing broken equipment in space When the heaters on the primary roll thrusters failed in 2004, engineers thought they couldn't be fixed. But with the threat posed by clogging looming, the team returned to the drawing board to see what had gone wrong. Engineers considered the possibility that a disturbance in the circuits controlling the power supply to the heaters flipped a switch to the wrong position — and flipping it to the original position might restart the heaters, and in turn, the primary roll thrusters. But it wasn't a straightforward solution for a probe that's operating so far away. The spacecraft is currently beyond the heliosphere, the sun's bubble of magnetic fields and particles that extends well beyond the orbit of Pluto. The mission team had to take a risk by switching Voyager 1 to its primary roll thrusters and turning them on before attempting to fix and restart the heaters. The heaters could only function if the thrusters are also switched on. If Voyager 1 drifted too far from its guide star, the spacecraft's programming would trigger the roll thrusters to fire — but if the heaters weren't turned on yet at that moment, the automatic sequence could have triggered a small explosion. A nail-biting test In addition to the risk, the team, which began its work earlier this year, was facing a time constraint. A giant Earth-based antenna in Canberra, Australia, went offline May 4 for upgrades that will be ongoing until February 2026. NASA's Deep Space Network enables the agency to communicate with all of its spacecraft — but its Canberra antenna is the only one with enough signal strength to send commands to the Voyager probes. 'These antenna upgrades are important for future crewed lunar landings, and they also increase communications capacity for our science missions in deep space, some of which are building on the discoveries Voyager made,' said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager and director of the Interplanetary Network at JPL, which manages the Deep Space Network for NASA, in a statement. 'We've been through downtime like this before, so we're just preparing as much as we can.' While the antenna will briefly operate in August and December, the mission team members wanted to command Voyager 1 to test its long-dormant thrusters before they could no longer communicate with the spacecraft. This way, if they need to turn on the thrusters in August, the team would know whether that was a viable option. On March 20, the team waited to see the results return from Voyager 1 after sending a command to the probe the day before to activate the thrusters and heaters. It takes more than 23 hours for data to travel back from Voyager 1 to Earth due to the sheer distance between the two. Had the test failed, Voyager 1 may have already been at risk. But the team watched the data stream in, showing the temperature of the thruster heaters rising dramatically, and knew it had worked. 'It was such a glorious moment. Team morale was very high that day,' said Todd Barber, the mission's propulsion lead at JPL, in a statement. 'These thrusters were considered dead. And that was a legitimate conclusion. 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 yet another miracle save for Voyager.'
Yahoo
15-05-2025
- Science
- Yahoo
‘Dead' thrusters revived to help Voyager 1 through a communications pause
Sign up for CNN's Wonder Theory science newsletter. Explore the universe with news on fascinating discoveries, scientific advancements and more. Engineers at NASA say they have successfully revived thrusters aboard Voyager 1, the farthest spacecraft from our planet, in the nick of time before a planned communications blackout. A side effect of upgrades to an Earth-based antenna that sends commands to Voyager 1 and its twin, Voyager 2, the communications pause could have occurred when the probe faced a critical issue — thruster failure — leaving the space agency without a way to save the historic mission. The new fix to the vehicle's original roll thrusters, out of action since 2004, could help keep the veteran spacecraft operating until it's able to contact home again next year. Voyager 1, launched in September 1977, uses more than one set of thrusters to function properly. Primary thrusters carefully orient the spacecraft so it can keep its antenna pointed at Earth. This ensures that the probe can send back data it collects from its unique perspective 15.5 billion miles (25 billion kilometers) away in interstellar space, as well as receive commands sent by the Voyager team. Within the primary set are additional thrusters that control the spacecraft's roll, which enables Voyager 1 to remain pointed at a guide star so it can remain oriented in space. If Voyager can't control its roll motion, the mission could be threatened. But as the thrusters fire, tiny amounts of propellant residue have built up over time. So far, engineers have managed to avoid clogging by commanding Voyager 1 to cycle between its original and backup thrusters for orientation, as well as a set of thrusters that were used to change the spacecraft's trajectory during planetary flybys in the 1980s. The trajectory thrusters, however, do nothing to contribute to the spacecraft's roll. Voyager 1's original roll thrusters stopped working more than two decades ago after power was lost in two internal heaters, which means the spacecraft has been relying on the backup roll thrusters to remain pointed at a guide star ever since. '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,' said Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement. 'And, frankly, they probably didn't think the Voyagers were going to keep going for another 20 years.' Now, Voyager 1 engineers are concerned that clogging from the residue could cause the spacecraft's backup roll thrusters to stop working as soon as this fall — and they had to get creative, as well as take risks, to revive the long-defunct primary roll thrusters. When the heaters on the primary roll thrusters failed in 2004, engineers thought they couldn't be fixed. But with the threat posed by clogging looming, the team returned to the drawing board to see what had gone wrong. Engineers considered the possibility that a disturbance in the circuits controlling the power supply to the heaters flipped a switch to the wrong position — and flipping it to the original position might restart the heaters, and in turn, the primary roll thrusters. But it wasn't a straightforward solution for a probe that's operating so far away. The spacecraft is currently beyond the heliosphere, the sun's bubble of magnetic fields and particles that extends well beyond the orbit of Pluto. The mission team had to take a risk by switching Voyager 1 to its primary roll thrusters and turning them on before attempting to fix and restart the heaters. The heaters could only function if the thrusters are also switched on. If Voyager 1 drifted too far from its guide star, the spacecraft's programming would trigger the roll thrusters to fire — but if the heaters weren't turned on yet at that moment, the automatic sequence could have triggered a small explosion. In addition to the risk, the team, which began its work earlier this year, was facing a time constraint. A giant Earth-based antenna in Canberra, Australia, went offline May 4 for upgrades that will be ongoing until February 2026. NASA's Deep Space Network enables the agency to communicate with all of its spacecraft — but its Canberra antenna is the only one with enough signal strength to send commands to the Voyager probes. 'These antenna upgrades are important for future crewed lunar landings, and they also increase communications capacity for our science missions in deep space, some of which are building on the discoveries Voyager made,' said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager and director of the Interplanetary Network at JPL, which manages the Deep Space Network for NASA, in a statement. 'We've been through downtime like this before, so we're just preparing as much as we can.' While the antenna will briefly operate in August and December, the mission team members wanted to command Voyager 1 to test its long-dormant thrusters before they could no longer communicate with the spacecraft. This way, if they need to turn on the thrusters in August, the team would know whether that was a viable option. On March 20, the team waited to see the results return from Voyager 1 after sending a command to the probe the day before to activate the thrusters and heaters. It takes more than 23 hours for data to travel back from Voyager 1 to Earth due to the sheer distance between the two. Had the test failed, Voyager 1 may have already been at risk. But the team watched the data stream in, showing the temperature of the thruster heaters rising dramatically, and knew it had worked. 'It was such a glorious moment. Team morale was very high that day,' said Todd Barber, the mission's propulsion lead at JPL, in a statement. 'These thrusters were considered dead. And that was a legitimate conclusion. 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 yet another miracle save for Voyager.'
