NASA Saves Voyager 1 Probe With Risky Manipulation Billions of Miles Away
However, like any hardware, the more time passes, the more potential failures there are. Because of an aging rubber diaphragm in the probe's fuel tank, a thruster tube became clogged with silicon dioxide. If NASA had not done anything, because of this plug reducing the efficiency of the thrusters, the probe would have lost its alignment with Earth, making it impossible to send commands and receive data. An end of mission, then.
A perilous change of propulsion
Fortunately, the engineers at the US space agency had a solution: change the thruster! Voyager 1 actually has three: two altitude thrusters and one trajectory correction thruster. Today, the probe is far out of its way on its routeheliosphereany of the three could be used to repoint it towards Earth. Unfortunately, in 2002, and again in 2018, the altitude thrusters also became clogged, which led the teams to use the trajectory correction thruster, which is now starting to tire in turn.
This last thruster is even more obstructed than those of altitude. The engineers were therefore obliged to return to one of the thrusters previously abandoned. A manipulation that would have been easy to carry out in the past, but today complex knowing that all the non-essential on-board systems have been inactivated in order to save the energy provided by the dying radioisotope thermoelectric generators. This is particularly the case of radiators designed to prevent the unused thrusters from cooling too much.
To relight these radiators before changing the active thruster, the engineers had to cut other systems, while everything today is considered essential. A headache that resulted in the shutdown for an hour of one of the probe's main radiators. A winning bet since on August 27, the return to life of the trajectory correction thruster was confirmed.
A mission destined to conclude
While the event is obviously positive, even miraculous, it also serves to highlight quite explicitly an inevitable deadline: the imminent end of Voyager 1's useful life. A new thruster problem could be fatal, while Suzanne Dodd, head of the Voyager project at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory which manages Voyager for NASA, declares: “Any decisions we have to make in the future will require much more analysis and caution than before.”
It is therefore only a matter of time before Voyager 1 suffers an irreversible failure and continues through the cosmos on an eternal journey.
