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Once ‘dead’ thrusters on the farthest spacecraft from Earth are in action again
NASA engineers have revived old thrusters on Voyager 1 to prevent a clog from endangering the mission during a planned communications blackout.
“I think at that time, the team was OK with accepting that the primary roll thrusters didn’t work, because they had a perfectly good backup,” said Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California, in a statement. NASA’s Deep Space Network enables the agency to communicate with all of its spacecraft — but its Canberra antenna is the only one with enough signal strength to send commands to the Voyager probes. While the antenna will briefly operate in August and December, the mission team members wanted to command Voyager 1 to test its long-dormant thrusters before they could no longer communicate with the spacecraft.
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