NASA fixes another problem on Voyager 1 as it moves through interstellar space

Voyager 1 spacecraft is phoning home once again while remaining pointed at Earth, thanks to a clever trick carried out by NASA scientists. It is flying through interstellar space at the moment after being launched in 1977. It developed thruster issues due to which it was unable to stay pointed at Earth when calling home.

So to continue to remain connected with Earth, it needed to switch to a different thruster set. However, it was tricky since Voyager 1 is 47 years old and any sudden changes could damage the spacecraft.

So NASA had to think out of the box.

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"All the decisions we will have to make going forward are going to require a lot more analysis and caution than they once did," Suzanne Dodd, Voyager's project manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory that manages the mission, said in a statement on Tuesday (Sep10).

The fuel tubes for their thrusters have been prone to clogging for more than 20 years. The Voyager has three thruster branches, two attitude branches designed for orientation, and one trajectory correction branch made for pathway changes in space.

In 2002, the first attitude propulsion branch started to clog. So it switched to the second branch, NASA officials said in the statement. However, the second branch began also started showing signs of clogging in 2018, so Voyager 1's orientation manoeuvres switched to the trajectory correction branch.

Now the problem being faced was even this branch started to clog up, much worse than the attitude branches. This JPL decides to go back to the attitude propulsion system. However, this time the challenge was bigger as the spacecraft has a lot less power than in 2002.

Currently, Voyager 1 is running only on essential systems, and some of its heaters have been turned off. This meant that due to diminished radiant heat, Voyager 1's dormant attitude propulsion thruster branch was quite cold and risked damage if turned on.

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So, JPL engineers had an idea - switch on one of the heaters for an hour. It worked and one of the attitude thruster branches successfully reoriented Voyager 1 towards Earth on August 27 for the first time in six years.

In June, a data transmission problem that had been affecting the spacecraft for months was also fixed.

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2

Voyager 1 and Voyager 2 were sent to space more than 47 years ago to study the distant solar system. They flew by by four largest outer solar system planets by 1989 and are now in interstellar space, where the sun's gravity or particles cannot reach. They left the solar system in the early 2010s.