How the 47-year-old Voyager spacecraft are still exploring space

The Voyager 1 and 2 probes person been connected a singular journey. Since their motorboat successful 1977, they person traveled done nan star system, past respective of nan outer planets, and headed retired beyond nan borders of nan star strategy and into interstellar space. They are nan astir distant man-made objects successful nan universe, and they are still going — moreover 47 years aft they first near Earth.

Keeping nan aged exertion moving for this agelong hasn’t been easy, though. Various instruments person had to beryllium turned off successful bid to prevention power, and nan probes person had their stock of computer glitches to woody with. But they proceed to cod subject information to this day, revealing accusation astir nan composition of space beyond nan sun’s power and viewing events acold beyond our planet.

This is imaginable acknowledgment to nan unthinkable longevity of nan spacecraft, which person kept moving done each sorts of challenges. When you see really often a caller telephone aliases machine starts to neglect wrong a fewer years, it’s profoundly awesome that nan spacecraft person tally for astir 5 decades. As John Casani, a erstwhile Voyager task head from 1975 to 1977, explained, “we didn’t creation them to past 30 years aliases 40 years, we designed them not to fail.”

Part of that creation accuracy is astir redundancy, an important rule for each abstraction hardware. The thought is to person backups of everything, truthful erstwhile 1 constituent stops working, location is simply a spare connected committee fresh to return over. That moreover applies to having 2 Voyager probes, according  theto existent task head of Voyager, Suzanne Dodd: “[Voyager] was designed pinch astir everything redundant. Having 2 spacecraft — correct location is simply a redundancy.”

Just past month, nan Voyager 1 probe knowledgeable a problem pinch its thrusters that was caused by a clogged substance tube. The conduit should person had an opening of astir 0.01 inches successful diameter, but a buildup of silicon dioxide had reduced that to 0.0015 inches, and this was making nan thrusters acold little effective than they should person been. The spacecraft does person different thrusters it tin usage instead, but switching complete was a delicate and observant process that required utilizing important powerfulness to lukewarm them up first.

There’s a trad-eoff betwixt getting much thrust, for example, and nan consequence to nan subject instruments that occurred erstwhile they had to beryllium temporarily unopen disconnected to lukewarm up nan different thrusters.

“All nan decisions we will person to make going guardant are going to require a batch much study and be aware than they erstwhile did,” Dodd said of nan repair.

The challenges of moving connected specified an aged ngo see dealing pinch outdated programming languages and highly constricted resources — not to mention nan communications delay. As Voyager is truthful acold away, it takes almost a afloat 24 hours to nonstop a awesome and different time to person a response. People person been brought retired of status to thief hole nan spacecraft, moving pinch newer engineers to travel up pinch imaginative solutions.

“From wherever I beryllium arsenic a task manager, it’s really very breathtaking to spot young engineers beryllium excited to activity connected Voyager. To return connected nan challenges of an aged ngo and to activity broadside by broadside pinch immoderate of nan masters, nan group that built nan spacecraft,” Dodd said. “They want to study from each other.”