Engineers from the Voyager
team dug up decades-old data to send a message to the intrepid spacecraft 13
BILLION MILES AWAY asking it to repurpose thrusters that have not been fired
since November 1980. Astonishingly, even travelling at the speed of light, the
signal took more than 17 hours to travel from NASA to Voyager 1 out in
interstellar space.
Jet propulsion engineer Todd
Barber said: “The mood was one of relief, joy and incredulity after witnessing
these well-rested thrusters pick up the baton as if no time had passed at all.”
Voyager 1 uses thrusters to orientate itself so it can send messages to earth
as it ventures deeper into unexplored space.
After information sent to
earth revealed that the thrusters designed to allow the craft to communicate
with earth were losing power and having to work harder ingenious NASA engineers
were able to figure out a fix from billions of miles away. The thruster test
was designed to see if the “trajectory correction manoeuvre” (TCM) thrusters
could take over the job of the failing “attitude control thrusters” and add
years to the lifespan of the satellite.
Mr Barber said: “The Voyager
team got more excited each time with each milestone in the thruster test.”
The TCM thrusters were last
used during a historic flyby of Saturn before Voyager 1 became the first
man-made object to enter interstellar space. Chief engineer Chris Jones said:
“The Voyager flight team dug up decades-old data and examined the software that
was coded in an outdated assembler language, to make sure we could safely test
the thrusters.”
In the vacuum of space puffs
measured in just milliseconds are enough to make the manoeuvres needed to allow
Voyager to send and receive information from earth. The test was such a
surprising success that NASA engineers are likely to perform a similar test on
Voyager 2, the twin spacecraft to Voyager 1, even though its main thrusters are
still working.
Voyager 2 is about to follow
its sister ship and make the historic leap into interstellar space in the next
few weeks.
Via Express.co.uk