We hate to admit it, but whenever we see an article about either Voyager spacecraft, our thoughts immediately turn to worst-case scenarios. One of these days, we’ll be forced to write obituaries for the plucky interstellar travelers, but today is not that day, even with news of yet another issue aboard Voyager 1 that threatens its ability to communicate with Earth.
According to NASA, the current problem began on October 16 when controllers sent a command to turn on one of the spacecraft’s heaters. Voyager 1, nearly a light-day distant from Earth, failed to respond as expected 46 hours later. After some searching, controllers picked up the spacecraft’s X-band downlink signal but at a much lower power than expected. This indicated that the spacecraft had gone into fault protection mode, likely in response to the command to turn on the heater. A day later, Voyager 1 stopped communicating altogether, suggesting that further fault protection trips disabled the powerful X-band transmitter and switched to the lower-powered S-band downlink.
This was potentially mission-ending; the S-band downlink had last been used in 1981 when the probe was still well within the confines of the solar system, and the fear was that the Deep Space Network would not be able to find the weak signal. But find it they did, and on October 22 they sent a command to confirm S-band communications. At this point, controllers can still receive engineering data and command the craft, but it remains to be seen what can be done to restore full communications. They haven’t tried to turn the X-band transmitter back on yet, wisely preferring to further evaluate what caused the fault protection error that kicked this whole thing off before committing to a step like that.
Following Voyager news these days feels a little morbid, like a death watch on an aging celebrity. Here’s hoping that this story turns out to have a happy ending and that we can push the inevitable off for another few years. While we wait, if you want to know a little more about the Voyager comms system, we’ve got a deep dive that should get you going.
Thanks to [Mark Stevens] for the tip.
A certain old man from a well known British car show comes to mind.
Night rider?
clarkson’s farm has good reviews. it’s just the british paparazzi are a crowd of jackals that delight in writing derogatory hit pieces.
I worked with him once. He is a horrible human. Really.
” whenever we see an article about either Voyager spacecraft, our thoughts immediately turn to worst-case scenarios.”
Not me. My thoughts are why are we still spending tax dollars, and time on this.
My thoughts are why are you here? on this site at all?
Because it’s still doing science after nearly 50 years.
The tax dollar comment is silly. But, to put numbers on it. The cost will mostly be in people, so, team size. https://www.jpl.nasa.gov/images/pia26275-voyager-team-celebrates-engineering-data-return/ here we see how many people are in the team, I count 18 people. According to glassdoor, JPL salaries range from $119K to $175K. So, to make math easy, say 18*175K, 3.15mil dollars per year. Assuming they work full time on just voyager (unlikely)
The NASA budget is $24875mil dollars. So, 0.0127% of the NASA budget goes to voyager at the WORST case. That to collect data from it’s 4 working instruments, to collect data that would be impossible to know in any other way. As it’s unique in many ways.
It’s unique because the gravity assists from all the planets required very specific planet alignment that doesn’t happen often. It’s not like we can quickly send a new probe to catch up to it.
As for time, that is something you could argue. Not the time of people (we have a lot of people here, with a lot of time). But we only have 1 deep space network, and it can generally only focus on 1 thing. No idea how time constrained that is. So there there might be an argument against it…
There you go, the new challenge is to build better antennas, maybe in space.