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Voyager 1 Fires Up Thrusters After 37 Years (nasa.gov)
If you tried to start a car that's been sitting in a garage for decades, you might not expect the engine to respond. But a set of thrusters aboard the Voyager 1 spacecraft successfully fired up Wednesday after 37 years without use. NASA announces: Voyager 1, NASA's farthest and fastest spacecraft, is the only human-made object in interstellar space, the environment between the stars. The spacecraft, which has been flying for 40 years, relies on small devices called thrusters to orient itself so it can communicate with Earth. These thrusters fire in tiny pulses, or "puffs," lasting mere milliseconds, to subtly rotate the spacecraft so that its antenna points at our planet. Now, the Voyager team is able to use a set of four backup thrusters, dormant since 1980. "With these thrusters that are still functional after 37 years without use, we will be able to extend the life of the Voyager 1 spacecraft by two to three years," said Suzanne Dodd, project manager for Voyager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Pasadena, California.
But do his thrusters work after 37 years?
Yeah, I agree it's amazing... but I'm not looking forward to when it eventually returns.
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The space between the stars? Show me somewhere that isn't between two stars.
Harvey Weinstein's dick. According to my calculations, it was periodically positioned inside a star at one time or another.
I only believe it has left "our backyard" when we get a ticket for flying a vehicle without a license in public interstellar space.
It's not the second gas giant that's the reason they're avoiding us. It's the rings around Uranus.
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2620 can't come soon enough.
This space unintentionally left blank.
Fifty fears from now, imagine space aliens come to earth with our satellite, and ask us to play for them what's on the records. We look around, but, embarrassed, can't find a turntable.
>but we really don't know what the nature of space beyond the sun's immediate influence looks like.
If only we could construct some sort of vehicle that could traverse space and send back signals...
About 2.7 Kelvin according to wikipedia.
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