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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.
That honestly boggles the mind to think of something built so long ago, sitting in the harsh environment of space still able to function that well - not to mention all of the other hardware working well enough to instruct the thrusters to fire. Well done.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
But do his thrusters work after 37 years?
The space between the stars? Show me somewhere that isn't between two stars.
It seems NASA has an answer at https://spaceplace.nasa.gov/in...
Just pull out the choke, pump the throttle, put a cartridge in the Coffman starter and fire it.
Have gnu, will travel.
FYI, you can see what each antenna in NASA's Deep Space Network is doing at any given moment by Looking at this site..
Below each antenna is the craft being communicated to. Clicking on the antenna and then "+ more detail" will get you some info about signal strengths, transmission rates, round trip light times, and more.
I don't see one right this moment but it is common to find one of the 70m antennas talking to one of the Voyagers. Right now Goldstone antenna 14 (70m) is talking with New Horizons.
Captcha = acquire
left the solar system. There is the very real possibility that some Russian Cosmonauts have ended up there.
LK
"Hi. This is my friend, Jack Shit, and you don't know him." - Lord Kano
Yeah well that's all well and good until it comes back looking to merge with the creator.
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.
left the solar system.
That and a manhole cover.
Have gnu, will travel.
left the solar system.
That and a manhole cover.
and a teapot.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
The point is that the new one could have been built to last long too, while being efficient.
I've seen some well-built appliances for $3-5000 a pop. Bet they last a long-time. Too bad I can't afford them.
His ignorance covered the whole earth like a blanket, and there was hardly a hole in it anywhere. - Mark Twain
https://www.goodreads.com/quot...
"The reason that the rich were so rich, Vimes reasoned, was because they managed to spend less money.
Take boots, for example. He earned thirty-eight dollars a month plus allowances. A really good pair of leather boots cost fifty dollars. But an affordable pair of boots, which were sort of OK for a season or two and then leaked like hell when the cardboard gave out, cost about ten dollars. Those were the kind of boots Vimes always bought, and wore until the soles were so thin that he could tell where he was in Ankh-Morpork on a foggy night by the feel of the cobbles.
But the thing was that good boots lasted for years and years. A man who could afford fifty dollars had a pair of boots that'd still be keeping his feet dry in ten years' time, while the poor man who could only afford cheap boots would have spent a hundred dollars on boots in the same time and would still have wet feet.
This was the Captain Samuel Vimes 'Boots' theory of socioeconomic unfairness."
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
Everyone knows what a vacuum of space looks like.
#DeleteFacebook
I like this thing is still working at nearly 40 years old and 20 light hours away, when my computer and phone update weekly, and I doubt my hardware would be supported in 30 years even if it still worked.
The millennial that doesn't like most of the stuff designed for millennials.