Charlie Meredith

VOYAGER 1 JUST CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD Something thought to be broken for more than 20 years has suddenly come back to life on a spacecraft more than 15 billion miles from Earth. NASA’s Voyager 1, launched in 1977, recently faced another problem that could have threatened its ability to communicate with us. Engineers needed backup roll thrusters to help keep the spacecraft’s antenna precisely aimed at Earth. But those thrusters had been considered unusable since 2004 after their tiny heaters stopped receiving power. Then NASA engineers took another look at the old failure. They suspected the heaters might not actually be dead, but stuck in the wrong electrical state. So they sent a carefully planned command into deep space. The signal took more than 23 hours to reach Voyager 1. There was no instant response and no way to intervene if the spacecraft reacted badly. Engineers had to wait. Then, more than a day later, the telemetry arrived. The temperature had risen. The heaters were working. A system believed to be lost for two decades had been brought back to life from billions of miles away. The timing matters. Voyager’s working thrusters are slowly becoming less reliable as fuel residue builds up inside their narrow tubes. Meanwhile, the spacecraft’s nuclear power source loses about four watts every year. NASA has already been forced to shut down instruments to conserve its shrinking supply of electricity. Only two science instruments remain operating. And Voyager 1 is still heading farther into interstellar space. In November 2026, it is expected to become the first human-made object to reach a distance of one light-day from Earth — about 16.1 billion miles away. A spacecraft built nearly half a century ago is still whispering information back to Earth from the darkness between the stars. And somehow, every time it seems ready to fall silent, engineers find another way to keep it talking. Source: NASA/JPL