• Email Us: [email protected]
  • Contact Us: +1 718 874 1545
  • Skip to main content
  • Skip to primary sidebar

Medical Market Report

  • Home
  • All Reports
  • About Us
  • Contact Us

NASA Switches Thrusters On Voyager From 24,630,000,000 Kilometers Away

September 11, 2024 by Deborah Bloomfield

After a bumpy few years, we have good news about NASA’s Voyager 1 mission to share. NASA has successfully switched thrusters on the aging spacecraft from an impressive 24,630,000,000 kilometers (15,310,000,000 miles) away.

Advertisement

Voyager 1 has traveled further than any human-made object, crossing the heliopause and heading into interstellar space. While doing this, it has continued to send back useful data to Earth, helping us learn about the space between stars outside of our own Solar System. All this while working with just 69.63 kilobytes of memory, and running partly on code written in the archaic computer language Fortran 5.

“The button you press to open the door of your car, that has more compute power than the Voyager spacecrafts do,” Voyager project manager Suzanne Dodd explained to NPR. “It’s remarkable that they keep flying, and that they’ve flown for 46-plus years.”



In recent years, the spacecraft has begun to show signs of its age. For a time, it began sending back repeating patterns of 1s and 0s, rather than any useful science data. This problem – which turned out to be the result of corrupted memory – has thankfully been fixed with commands sent to the spacecraft. However, Voyager’s problems are not over.

An issue with the probe’s thrusters, which keep the probe pointed at Earth to receive such commands and send back useful data, was found by NASA.

Advertisement

“After 47 years, a fuel tube inside the thrusters has become clogged with silicon dioxide, a byproduct that appears with age from a rubber diaphragm in the spacecraft’s fuel tank,” NASA explained in a statement. “The clogging reduces how efficiently the thrusters can generate force.”

When operational, the liquid hydrazine thruster should release tiny, extremely short puffs of gas in order to adjust the spacecraft and point it towards Earth, needing to do this about 40 times a day. 

The spacecraft is actually equipped with three sets of thrusters, two for propulsion and one for trajectory correction. In 2002, the first propulsion thruster began to show signs of clogging and NASA switched to using the other, but this too began to show signs of clogging in 2018. Out on the edges of the Solar System and no longer performing any maneuvers, NASA switched to the trajectory correction thruster. However, that thruster is now even more clogged than the previous two, and NASA has spent months planning a switch back to one of the less-clogged thrusters.

This is a lot more complicated than you’d think, and you probably already think switching thrusters on a spacecraft further than any other human-made object has ever traveled is quite complicated to start with. 

Advertisement

In order to conserve power while still keeping science instruments running, NASA shut down several instruments as well as several heaters. Turning on a thruster when it has been cold for so long could result in it breaking, and so NASA had to warm them beforehand. With power in short supply (the plutonium-powered system that powers the craft is running out), the team had to shut down one of the main heaters of the spacecraft in order to turn on the thruster heater.

On August 27, they did this for an hour, before firing up the thruster once more. While successful, and Voyager continues to be able to point towards Earth, the mission will come to an end in the coming years as the power supply dwindles further, leaving Voyager 1 floating aimlessly in interstellar space.

Deborah Bloomfield
Deborah Bloomfield

Related posts:

  1. Near Space Labs closes $13M Series A to send more Earth imaging robots to the stratosphere
  2. Berlin police investigating ‘Havana syndrome’ cases at U.S. embassy – Spiegel
  3. What Is An Adam’s Apple?
  4. Nearest Young Earth-Sized Planet Is Half Lava And Metal As Hell

Source Link: NASA Switches Thrusters On Voyager From 24,630,000,000 Kilometers Away

Filed Under: News

Primary Sidebar

  • Earth’s Passage Through The Galaxy Might Be Written In Its Rocks
  • What Is An Einstein Cross – And Why Is The Latest One Such A Unique Find?
  • If We Found Life On Mars, What Would That Mean For The Fermi Paradox And The Great Filter?
  • The Longest Living Mammals Are Giants That Live Up To 200 Years In The Icy Arctic
  • Entirely New Virus Detected In Bat Urine, And It’s Only The 4th Of Its Kind Ever Isolated
  • The First Ever Full Asteroid History: From Its Doomed Discovery To Collecting Its Meteorites
  • World’s Oldest Pachycephalosaur Fossil Pushes Back These Dinosaurs’ Emergence By 15 Million Years
  • The Hole In The Ozone Layer Is Healing And On Track For Full Recovery In The 21st Century, Thanks To Science
  • First Sweet Potato Genome Reveals They’re Hybrids With A Puzzling Past And 6 Sets Of Chromosomes
  • Why Is The Top Of Canada So Sparsely Populated? Meet The “Canadian Shield”
  • Humans Are In The Middle Of “A Great Evolutionary Transition”, New Paper Claims
  • Why Do Some Toilets Have Two Flush Buttons?
  • 130-Year-Old Butter Additive Discovered In Danish Basement Contains Bacteria From The 1890s
  • Prehistoric Humans Made Necklaces From Marine Mollusk Fossils 20,000 Years Ago
  • Zond 5: In 1968 Two Soviet Steppe Tortoises Beat Humans To Orbiting Around The Moon
  • Why Cats Adapted This Defense Mechanism From Snakes
  • Mother Orca Seen Carrying Dead Calf Once Again On Washington Coast
  • A Busy Spider Season Is Brewing: Why This Fall Could See A Boom Of Arachnid Activity
  • What Alternatives Are There To The Big Bang Model?
  • Magnetic Flip Seen Around First Photographed Black Hole Pushes “Models To The Limit”
  • Business
  • Health
  • News
  • Science
  • Technology
  • +1 718 874 1545
  • +91 78878 22626
  • [email protected]
Office Address
Prudour Pvt. Ltd. 420 Lexington Avenue Suite 300 New York City, NY 10170.

Powered by Prudour Network

Copyrights © 2025 · Medical Market Report. All Rights Reserved.

Go to mobile version