NASA's Voyager 1 completed tricky thruster swap at 38,000 mph to stay in touch with Earth

[boingboing]

Originally published at: NASA's Voyager 1 completed tricky thruster swap at 38,000 mph to stay in touch with Earth - Boing Boing

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[Otherbrother]

@boingboing

Nearly 50 years after launch, the spacecraft and its twin have been showing signs of its age. Most recently, a fuel tube clogged up one of Voyager 1’s thrusters

Boeing Starliner Program Managers: “See? See?? Clogged thrusters happen all the time! Totally normal! What were you guys even complaining about?”

[ficuswhisperer]

It never fails to blow my mind how resilient this ancient piece of technology has been. My hat’s off to the engineers who built this, and to the engineers of today that have managed to come up with all sort of creative mitigations and solutions over the years to keep it alive.

@boingboing

However, as with so many challenges the Voyager team has faced, this presented a puzzle: The spacecraft’s power supply is so low that turning on non-essential heaters would require the mission to turn off something else to provide the heaters adequate electricity, and everything that’s currently operating is considered essential.

I bet whomever came up with the solution here is an ace at those water jug puzzles.

[robertmckenna]

@ficuswhisperer

It never fails to blow my mind how resilient this ancient piece of technology has been. My hat’s off to the engineers who built this, and to the engineers of today that have managed to come up with all sort of creative mitigations and solutions over the years to keep it alive.

It’s amazing.

It’s truly heroic.

It’s also epic.

I’m sad that the wearing of hats is less common as we should all have a Voyager day and sweep our hats off in unison in genuine appreciation.

[euansmith]

[ashe]

If this was a SpaceX craft, Musk would bill NASA $6 trillion dollars, and push a firmware update that cripples the spacecraft permanently, all while trying to get it to mine DOGEcoin.

[Gordon_Simpson]

Full space mining, we can do it ehmm now.

[ashe]

If he were to hold true to form, it would never arrive.

[anothernewbbaccount]

the golden phonograph record

‘Phonograph’- what quaint old term. But then this thing is over 50 years old! That fact alone, and that it is still working in some form, continues to amaze me.

(Also, I’d usually expect Pesco to be all over this Voyager stuff. Assumed it was a post from him until I saw ARH’s name on it.)

[JJA]

Against all the things you see people doing in the news, the deeds that get your blood boiling or make your heart break, the events that make you despair of the future…
Remember that Humanity does stuff like this, too.
Continue to fare well, Voyager.

[abutilon]

15 BILLION light years away?!? How do they keep up contact enough to turn devices on & off remotely? This mind boggles.

[Doctor_Faustus]

@abutilon

How do they keep up contact enough to turn devices on & off remotely?

With a lot of delay

[beschizza]

tricky thruster swap

[robertmckenna]

The tone! You have single handedly dragged it down.

Houses in this neighbourhood are losing value as we speak!

[BakerB]

It’s only 16 billion miles, not light years. Still amazing.

[anothernewbbaccount]

That figures - it is far beyond the solar system, after all.

[vrplumber]

15 billion light years is roughly the radius of the observable universe. Voyager is considerably closer than that.

[euansmith]

Space, eh; it’s deep…

Hawkwind - Space Is Deep

[bashful]

@BakerB

It’s only 16 billion miles

Only? That comes out close to 24 hours at the speed of light for communication in one direction! Round trip time of 2 days is one heck of a latency factor.

[ficuswhisperer]

And here I get upset with 100ms ping times. Waiting almost 2 days just to see if something worked must be excruciating.

They should really do something to speed those transmissions up, you know? Surely it can’t be that hard, right?