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.

Comments

Now THAT is amazing

[SuperKendall]

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.

Re:Now THAT is amazing

[Bruce Perens]

It's not even in our solar system any longer, having traversed the heliosphere of the solar wind into true interstellar space. Power from the nuclear thermal generator runs out in about 2020.

Re:Now THAT is amazing

[93 Escort Wagon]

Yeah, I agree it's amazing... but I'm not looking forward to when it eventually returns.

Re:Now THAT is amazing

[guruevi]

What's harsh about space other than it being relatively cold? Besides some solar radiation (which it's probably too far for anyway) there is nothing to interact with the systems, no molecules or fluctuations of radiation or physical pressure/stress that interact with it so it won't corrode or fatigue.

Yes, it's amazing that it still works because the design was good. What's more amazing is that they didn't fuck up the data transmission to interact with the hardware/software on the system. You're talking about 50's and 60's era electronics and hand-made/hand-programmed stuff that's still working at rates like 40 bits per seconds with nibble-sized serial communications to the CPU, how many programmers still know how much a nibble is these days and how to craft a message using it on modern systems?

Re:Now THAT is amazing

[aix tom]

I only believe it has left "our backyard" when we get a ticket for flying a vehicle without a license in public interstellar space.

Re:Now THAT is amazing

[nmb3000]

What's harsh about space other than it being relatively cold?

What comes to mind:

A temperature of minus 455 degrees Fahrenheit (only about 5 degrees above absolute zero). Many materials and electrical components do not behave or age the same when subjected to decades of extreme temperatures and it wouldn't be a surprise at all to find some materials slowly getting brittle or changing shape or thermal or electrical conduction.

Radiation. A complete lack of protection from a planet's magnetic field or atmosphere means every single gamma ray heading the right direction hits it, hence the shielding and hardened components used to build the satellites. Maybe this drops off as it moves away from the sun, but we really don't know what the nature of space beyond the sun's immediate influence looks like.

Heat dissipation. No atmosphere means there is no convection so all heat must be dissipated via radiation emissions, which can be very slow. This means if you have hot spots in your electronics or the RTG power system without proper heat sinks, it can build up to a thermal failure.

And in space, no one can hear you scream.

Re:Now THAT is amazing

[Brett Buck]

For these thrusters (which I think are Aerojet 0.2-lb monoprop, MR-103 series), there's nothing to degrade from mere age or vacuum, and the environmental thermal cycling is negligible. So it is not that surprising that they still work. Using them is another story, and pulsing certainly does degrade them (eventually - hundreds of thousands of pulses).

      It's not terribly unusual to switch to redundant equipment after decades and have it work. Essentially we rely on that working, and I have seen many examples of it working perfectly well. Vacuum is a very good storage medium for anything that does not outgas. Radiation degrades solid-state electronics and power supply components (particularly high-voltage components) are somewhat prone to degrading from age or outgassing. Longest I have personally been involved with is a prime flight computer that was believed to have failed on the day after the launch that was turned on 32 years later as a final test, and that worked fine for at least a few hours. But other components were switched to (of necessity) after ~20 years fired right up and worked fine, showing the same parameters as the day we turned it off.

Re:Now THAT is amazing

[gumbi west]

The radiation is mostly cosmic and, if you've ever priced a chip that is hardened for space travel, you'll know it isn't a minor price difference. It's nasty.

Re:Now THAT is amazing

[thegarbz]

What's harsh about space other than it being relatively cold?

That is much like saying what's harsh about the inside of the sun other than it being relatively hot. Or what's harsh about the surface of venus other than it rains sulphuric acid.

Electronics lasting 30+ years at only a fraction of a temperature above absolute zero, a point where molecules themselves stop moving completely is amazing. Physical stress isn't the only killer of equipment. The amazing part isn't the programming but those 50s and 60s era electronics still ticking along. I don't have anything from the 50s or 60s anymore that I haven't had to repair. Even back then electronics used chemically reactive components capable of drying out or physically changing, and I'm sure none of it would do so well submerged in liquid nitrogen either.

That just reminded me something. Liquid nitrogen is very effective at converting heat. Electronics in space typically undergo immense stress as there's no convection possible. They gradually cool to incredibly cold temperatures and then when they fire up have to rely on only radiation to dissipate heat. It's counter intuitive but if your simple design has a heatsink to run here on 25C earth then it will instantly overheat in the -270C space. milliwatts cause stress.

Re:Now THAT is amazing

[ckatko]

>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...

Re:Now THAT is amazing

[DontBeAMoran]

These designers really knew what they were doing. Oh, and it's still running on its original power source. How cool is that?!

About 2.7 Kelvin according to wikipedia.

Re:Now THAT is amazing

[Brett Buck]

It's not less than a millisecond, I think the minimum on-time is 15 milliseconds (you can go lower but you get disproportionate amounts of error).

          It's an electrically-driven valve, a skinny tube with an injector at the end, which is embedded in the catalyst. When the fuel is released, it squirts out the injector and onto the catalyst. This causes it to decompose into steam (think putting hydrogen peroxide on a cut in your skin, but vastly more energetic). The steam is then accelerated out a nozzle, creating thrust.

        As far as rocket engines go, it's not very efficient, and typically you have to heat the catalyst bed with a heater to keep the thermal shock of a firing from cracking the catalyst into dust. That, and development of "varnish" in the (tiny) injector passages - baked-on crud like a baking pan, is what causes them to wear out. One or both of those is apparently a factor in degradation of the prime attitude control set.

          It's not terribly good for attitude control purposes due to the limited pulse life in the "fire once, wait 3 days, fire again" duty cycle, but it has the advantage of being very small (0.15 or so lb) and very inexpensive (I think something like $20000 a piece now, much less at the time) and has an extraordinary number of flights on it.

Re:Trump Will Be Impeached

[sgage]

But do his thrusters work after 37 years?

Deep Space Network real time

[Anonymous Coward]

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

Gold Records

[kackle]

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.