NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix

The Register ^ | May 15, 2025 | Brandon Vigliarolo

[Governor Dinwiddie]

NASA has revived a set of thrusters on the nearly 50-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft after declaring them inoperable over two decades ago.

It's a nice long-distance engineering win for the team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, responsible for keeping the venerable Voyager spacecraft flying - and critical one at that, as clogging fuel lines threatened to derail the backup thrusters currently in use.

The things you have to deal with when your spacecraft is operating more than four decades beyond its original mission plan, eh? Voyager 1 launched in 1977.

JPL reported Wednesday that the maneuver, completed in March, restarted Voyager 1's primary roll thrusters, which are used to keep the spacecraft aligned with a tracking star. That guide star helps keep its high-gain antenna aimed at Earth, now over 15.6 billion miles away, and far beyond the reach of any telescope.

Those primary roll thrusters stopped working in 2004 after a pair of internal heaters lost power. Voyager engineers long believed they were broken and unfixable. The backup roll thrusters in use are now at risk due to residue buildup in their fuel lines, which could cause failure as early as this fall.

Without roll thrusters, Voyager 1 would lose its ability to stay properly oriented and eventually drift out of contact. To make matters worse, the only antenna on Earth with enough power to send commands to the Voyager probes - the 230-foot-wide DSS-43 dish in Australia - is undergoing an upgrade shutdown until next February, with only a couple of brief operational windows in August and December.

While other dishes around the world can still receive data from the Voyagers, those windows are the only opportunities to send commands to the spacecraft, which remain the most distant human-made objects in existence.

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TOPICS: Miscellaneous; Technical
KEYWORDS: nasa; voyager

[Governor Dinwiddie]

I can't even get my TV remote to work half the time.

Bravo JPL.

[wjcsux]

When you take a serious look at the Voyager Program, it was an engineering marvel that I doubt we will ever see again in our lifetime.

[Army Air Corps]

Ping.

[Tellurian]

https://science.nasa.gov/wp-content/uploads/2024/04/pale-blue-dot-revised.jpg?resize=1536,1520

[Governor Dinwiddie]

We don't have the engineers anymore. Those guys have been with the program since its inception. Some have retired, but there are still some talented old timers there. They never played a video game in their life. Why would they, when Voyager is your job.

[Flag_This]

We’re all going to regret this when V’ger comes back.

[verum ago]

I wonder if any human space probes in the nearish future will ever match this level of longevity.

Surely at some point the ever-diminishing size of individual circuits in CPUs will make them shorter-lived in a damaging high energy radiation environment, even despite radiation hardening efforts, right?

There must be (for current technology barring a radical change) a sweet spot between computing power and robustness. I wonder if the Voyagers were near it.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

Yeah, for sure. I saw Close Encounter too!

[TigersEye]

Always use fresh fuel with a fuel stabilizer
and purge the fuel tank and lines if you’re not using the equipment for 90 days or more.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

Good advice. Applicable to lawn mowers too.

[Southside_Chicago_Republican]

Bookmark

[MinorityRepublican]

We don't have the engineers anymore.

We do. They work for Elon Musk.

[doorgunner69]

I worked designing Sat-com antennas for good while.

The control hardware and software to control that beast of an antenna are awesome.

[TigersEye]

Regular maintenance is recommended.
Service calls over a billion miles are very expensive
especially when replacement parts are required.

[Secret Agent Man]

These are NASA’s most successful unmanned spacecraft missions. They will likely never outperform them.

[wjcsux]

I graduated from the University of Arizona in 1978 with a BS in Mechanical Engineering. Almost all of the professors at that time were guys who had very successful careers in industry prior to teaching. Unfortunately, the engineering faculty in today’s world have spent their entire careers in academia.

[Governor Dinwiddie]

I was thinking about the phase-locked loops in the radios. They must be discrete, like an old fashioned balanced mixer. RCA used to make radiation hardened 4000 series discrete CMOS logic gates, which included a PLL chip in that stable.

Locking onto a radio signal from over a billion miles is just astounding. And antenna design is a black art as you know. These guys did it with a pencil and a Smith Chart. "No AI for you!"

[null and void]

↑↑↑THIS!↑↑↑

[Governor Dinwiddie]

Engineers were a special breed in those days. And yes, almost every prof had industry experience.

[dadfly]

that’s fabulous news.

thank God H1-B mediocrity hasn’t replaced Voyager’s intrepid crew yet.