Voyager 1’s 20-year-old thrusters brought back to life in high-stakes repair
NASA engineers have executed a high-stakes repair on Voyager 1, resurrecting thrusters inactive since 2004 to safeguard the spacecraft during an upcoming communications blackout. The 46-year-old probe, now 15.5 billion miles away in interstellar space, faced potential mission failure if its backup roll thrusters failed due to propellant clogging.
“It was such a glorious moment. Team morale was very high that day,” said Todd Barber, the mission’s propulsion lead at JPL, in a statement. “These thrusters were considered dead. And that was a legitimate conclusion. It’s just that one of our engineers had this insight that maybe there was this other possible cause and it was fixable. It was yet another miracle save for Voyager.”