As with all aging bodies, clogged tubes form an increasing issue. So too with the 47-year old Voyager 1 spacecraft and its hydrazine thrusters. Over the decades silicon dioxide from an aging rubber diaphragm in the fuel tank has been depositing on the inside of fuel tubes. By switching between primary, backup and trajectory thrusters the Voyager team has been managing this issue and kept the spacecraft oriented towards Earth. Now this team has performed another amazing feat by reviving the primary thrusters that had been deemed a loss since a heater failure back in 2004.
Unlike the backup thrusters, the trajectory thrusters do not provide roll control, so reviving the primary thrusters would buy the mission a precious Plan B if the backup thrusters were to fail. Back in 2004 engineers had determined that the heater failure was likely unfixable, but over twenty years later the team was willing to give it another shot. Analyzing the original failure data indicated that a glitch in the heater control circuit was likely to blame, so they might actually still work fine.
To test this theory, the team remotely jiggled the heater controls, enabled the primary thrusters and waited for the spacecraft’s star tracker to drift off course so that the thrusters would be engaged by the onboard computer. Making this extra exciting was scheduled maintenance on the Deep Space Network coming up in a matter of weeks, which would have made troubleshooting impossible for months.
To their relief the changes appears to have worked, with the heaters clearly working again, as are the primary thrusters. With this fix in place, it seems that Voyager 1 will be with us for a while longer, even as we face the inevitable end to the amazing Voyager program.
board computer -> onboard computers
which would troubleshooting – > which would make troubleshooting
changes appears -> changes appear
thank you for your service
“jiggled” – one of many technical terms I use on a regular basis.
It always makes me think of the character Arkwright from the 1970s sitcom Open All Hours. He had a 1970s comedy stutter and one of his catchphrases was “Ju-ju-just j-j-jiggle it a bit”, referring to the ever misbehaving till that looked like it came from the Victorian era and endangered any fingers that came near it.
“Give the television set a smack on the side and it’s in working condition again.”
Something like that?
It’s hard to do from ~15 billion miles away.
I’ve heard it called Newton’s Method. Apply an action (smack it) and check the reaction.
My favorite is “percussive maintainence”
I don’t get how they jiggled them remotely? If their mass budget included 2lbs for a standard jiggling tool , surely they’d have used that for a backup heater? :P
Can’t believe they got the old thrusters working again after all these years. Voyager just keeps going!
You gotta keep rooting for the ol gal, she’s really something special
Well, it keeps going no matter what…
Voyager is a testament to the KISS principle.
Ok, it was high-tech and complex for the time. ;) But simple, compared to the available technology now.
Can you imagine that in 48 years your Samsung S25 phone starts to act up a little, but you get it to continue to work for another 5 years by jiggling a button?
Like a Nokia 3310
It’s actually not. They were super-risky when launched. Extremely short development cycle and launched with extremely recent tech (CMOS static RAM).
The whole story would be too unbelievable for a movie. Both had launch anomalies (V1 barely made it), one of them literally lost half the memory shortly after launch, and both of them had multiple “panic” moments right before critical encounters. And that was just the primary mission!
Good engineering and a lot of luck.
Oh Pat, you strike again! 🙂 Early CMOS was very fragile, especially RAM, I would say.
The whole 4000 series of semiconductors was prone to damage through electro-static discharge (ESD). It was widely know among hobbyists.
Later chips of the old 74 series (TTL series, originally) then had acted as replacement to 4000 parts.
But that being said, it wasn’t about the fundamental technology. That was fine, it was understood.
It was the ruggedness (or lack thereof) of early CMOS chips that caused issues and failures.
The circuits within, from a logical point of view, were well done already.
Modern CMOS chips have protective circuits against ESD built-in.
What are you talking about? This was the first space usage of CMOS RAM. They literally wrote papers on how it performed. They had guesses as to how it would work in, say, Jupiter’s environment, but they were guesses. It wasn’t safe. It couldn’t be. They didn’t have the time.
This was literally part of the anniversary talk Ed Stone gave on it a number of years ago (before he sadly passed).
You need to remember when Voyager was developed. It was during an era when cuts were rapidly happening.
It would be interesting to see a picture of Earth from its current position.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pale_Blue_Dot
Take a look at the final character you typed – it looks like that. :)
I was born the 1977, the year the Voyager probes launched.
They may not outlive me, but I won’t bet on that. 2036ish seems to be an upper limit, so far, AFAICT, but I wonder if any further creative workarounds might extend that somehow.
Either way, they are clearly much more reliable than I am, much lower maintenance and more communicative too. :)
Seriously, this as an awesome achievement, the kind that we should reflect and try to build upon, especially at times when the future may seem bleak.
There are always possibilities.
Don’t feel so bad, they’re actually just as broken. Both of them have large amounts of memory loss, V2’s speech is weird and slurred, and they don’t have nearly the energy they did when they were younger and have had to give up tons of their hobbies just to keep going.
Well, technically, wouldn’t it be possible to send radio relays?
Going faster than voyager may be hard if ever possible, but we still have some range now, so as long as we don’t wait an other 10 year to launch the relay, we should be able to (almost) double the communication range at max (doubling latency too I presume, but, hey, it’s very very far from everything).
I always wondered why we didn’t send a “geo orbital” communication satellite/relay around every planet of our solar system.
I mean, it wouldn’t cost THAT much, and could be so useful…
Hi, the problem is more of a political than a technological.
It takes nothing more than the power of a C64 to go to moon, for example.
We have the technology. For 40 years, at least.
But not the will to invest, to support such projects.
Let’s see what they did to Arecibo.
They did let it rot, many of us ordinary people had awaited the collapse before it happened.
Then the news made it so as if it was a surprise no one saw coming. Sigh.
If humanity would act as one, work together, like they slightly began in the 2000s, such space projects were no burden at all.
No. There’s no space relay that you could realistically build that would outperform the DSN. They’re ridiculously huge.
But: Voyager’s hard limits are power and hydrazine. Both of them are finite and running out. There are no magic tricks around that. Comms is not a serious issue.
The earthside antenna for Voyager is 34 meters diameter, and that’s what we’d need for a relay. For a rigid single piece antenna, that’s beyond current launch capability. I suppose a patchwork rigid antenna could be assembled in orbit and boosted to follow Voyager. That would be terribly expensive and there’s no guarantee Voyager would still be working.
Much less expensive would be to double the diameter of the earthside antenna(s), which would double the effective range.
Also:
“I always wondered why we didn’t send a “geo orbital” communication satellite/relay around every planet of our solar system.”
Because it wouldn’t help. Even ignore the fact that the relays would be tiny and much lower power. You’re thinking about the solar system as being in a line. It’s not. It’s farther to go from Neptune to Jupiter to Earth than just straight.
Funny stat: what planet is closest to Earth, on average? It isn’t Venus. It isn’t Mars. It’s Mercury. Closest planet to Neptune? Not Uranus. Mercury again.
Just go straight to Earth. On average it’s always the shortest path.
We do have satellite relays for ground stuff on Mars. There it makes sense.
“As with all aging bodies, clogged tubes form an increasing issue.”
Most old men can relate to that.
It’s never more obvious who won the X/Y chromosome lottery then in old age.
Which isn’t to say that men have it easy…
Just that old age for women is horrific.
Biology not culture
On the other hand:
Basic root of gender injustice in the world:
Women have half the money and all the pussy.
Just old men? Heart disease and strokes are also a very common cause of death among women.
Every single one of these stories floors me anew. They’re debugging and fixing things at an insanedistance with the crazy lag and super limited options available, and I’m struggling to make my JavaScript work.
You’re using the worst steaming POS coding tool on the planet and you have the nerve to bitch?
Pick a better tool.
I suggest GWBasic or DBase3+.
Can we make it come back? It deserves to be in a museum. One of humanities’ greatest achievements
Hi, there’s at least one sister model at an museum, I think..
we are not deserving of it returning.
Hi! This is indeed sort of true, I think.
The 1970s were the height of western civilization, culture wise.
It was a time of people being both spiritual and scientific.
The way they talked and acted, the level of morals/ethics.
Human social development and technological development were more balanced, maybe.
The 80s/90s were still “ok”, but the 1970s were more thoughtful, more elegant at times (not always).
Probably because people were less being influenced by TV, had to use their imagination more often, think on their own.
While simultanously had access to any source of information if they really cared (such as radio, X.25 networks, BBSes, public libraries, public telephoned, lexicons for kids/teens etc).
The Voyager probes are a memento of this moment of our human history, they are a time capsule.
The technology of the 1970s was a mix of tube era and early solid-state technology.
The circuits were hand-made using discrete components.
The longlived OSCAR 7 amateur satellite is also from that time and merely had failed in the 80s due to power loss rather than a defect (it’s now back to life via solar power).
I know that many won’t agree, but I think the 1970s were a special moment in several ways.
It was a time when certain things were possible, when “going were no man has gone before” was a noble thing to aim for.
When humanity was aiming for the stars, still.
It wasn’t all rainbows and sunshine (gender roles etc), of course, but humanity had behaved a little bit more mature at the time, maybe.
You had people interested in things like playing chess or watching the stars with a telescope in the backyards.
You had hams talking over radio and building strange things.
Or kids playing outside and simply being kids.
Anyway, I don’t mean to glorify things but if we look back to the media of the time,
we see people being engaged into playing hours of Zork, StarTrek and text-adventures. Or who had built chess computers.
It’s quite different to our modern times.
Things like C64 or Apple II are using technologies of the 70s.
That being said, I believe that the transition between eras is fluent.
The 1970s flew into the early 80s and the late 80s into early 90s.
So maybe, depending on how we look at it, the greatest things of the 80s were a legacy of the 1970s. :)
Interesting point of view.
I set it to the 80’s-90’s, but also, I’m French, and back in the days, each country had it’s own development and technologies.
But you indeed make sense, and I use basically the same local “values” (tech level, way of thinking about the future, etc.) to determine when things started to stagnate.
That being said, all is not lost, far from it.
And we also have wonderful things today.
It just seems like the discovery of informatics lead the humankind to “take a break and enjoy modernity for a bit”.
With all the… ‘less desirable things’ that came with stagnation.
But I’m sure we will soon start a new wave of discoveries and go back to a more “future is bright” time.
Arecibo failed because the science wasn’t there to support the infrastructure. That’s just the basic facts: there were things it could do that nothing else could, but not a ton, and the maintenance cost was high.
If you doubt me, consider Hubble; there, the maintenance cost is even higher but there are still people considering options because the science return is still very high.
I could point to a ton of other large scale “mega” science programs too. The VLA is only a few years younger than Arecibo but again, it’s maintained because the science return is higher.
Love this comment
This is a very elegant comment. Thank you. Give me hope.
Someday we will go out and fetch it as a major artifact of our earliest explorations.
Do you think so? I think a better memorial would be to leave it travelling and build an observation centre at a safe distance. Obviously retrieval would be easier earlier, but being able to see Voyager still voyaging would be far more significant to me.
Or something will return it to us carbon units.