Saw what you want about the wisdom of keeping a 50-year-old space mission going, but the dozen or so people still tasked with keeping the Voyager mission running are some major studs. That’s our conclusion anyway, after reading about the latest heroics that revived a set of thrusters on Voyager 1 that had been offline for over twenty years. The engineering aspects of this feat are interesting enough, but we’re more interested in the social engineering aspects of this exploit, which The Register goes into a bit. First of all, even though both Voyagers are long past their best-by dates, they are our only interstellar assets, and likely will be for centuries to come, or perhaps forever. Sure, the rigors of space travel and the ravages of time have slowly chipped away at what these machines can so, but while they’re still operating, they’re irreplaceable assets.
That makes the fix to the thruster problem all the more ballsy, since the Voyager team couldn’t be 100% sure about the status of the primary thrusters, which were shut down back in 2004. They thought it might have been that the fuel line heaters were still good, but if they actually had gone bad, trying to switch the primary thrusters back on with frozen fuel lines could have resulted in an explosion when Voyager tried to fire them, likely ending in a loss of the spacecraft. So the decision to try this had to be a difficult one, to say the least. Add in an impending shutdown of the only DSN antenna capable of communicating with the spacecraft and a two-day communications round trip, and the pr ..
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