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“We’re definitely going to make the 50th anniversary,” says Professor Garry Hunt, one of the scientists responsible for NASA’s Voyager mission, as Voyager 1 recovers from an surprising pause in communications.
Launched when Jimmy Carter was President of the United States, the two Voyager spacecraft have continued almost half a century of spaceflight and, according to Hunt, need to serene serene be in contact with Earth in 2027, 50 years after leaving the planet.
A spokesperson for NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory instructed The Register that the agency hopes there will be satisfactory energy from the onboard Radioisotope Thermoelectric Generators (RTGs) to maintain the antenna and at least one science instrument running till the early 2030s.
The energy produced by the RTGs is dwindling, and the Voyager team has been pressured to make sophisticated decisions to eke out what remains. The plasma science instrument was these days grew to develop into off on Voyager 2, leaving four instruments operating on the probes.
Things are, on the alternative hand, starting to stack up a minute for the hardy and effectively appreciated spacecraft. The small Voyager team at JPL managed to reach back up with a way to restore operations earlier this year after Voyager 1 began transmitting nonsense back to Earth. In September, engineers had to construct a delicate balancing act with the remaining energy to warm the thrusters.
Voyager 2 has also continued its share of travails. In 2023, communication with the probe was inadvertently interrupted after its antenna was accidentally pointed away from Earth. The Deep Space Network (DSN) therefore detected a carrier signal from the spacecraft.
On October 16, a command to turn on a heater resulted in Voyager 1 going soundless, with its signal no longer being picked up by the DSN. NASA said, “While Voyager 1 should have had ample power to operate the heater, the command triggered the fault protection system.”
The Voyager flight team said it believed the fault protection system had diminished the rate at which the transmitter was sending back data. Confirming this, engineers chanced on they had been able to fetch the signal again and figure out what had caused the upset.
That all went effectively till October 19, when communication from Voyager 1 appeared to halt fully. The idea was that the fault protection system had been precipitated twice extra, which meant Voyager 1 grew to develop into off the X-band transmitter in favor of the lower-powered S-band, which hadn’t been stale to communicate with Earth since 1981.
The fault protection system is designed to give protection to the spacecraft’s health if something goes wrong. In this case, the something goes wrong part was “not enough power.” Hunt instructed us the system “overreacted” and took engineers all of sudden.
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The Deep Space Network has been upgraded in the years since the launch of the Voyager probes, and Hunt cited these upgrades as a factor in engineers being able to detect the faint S-band signal from Voyager 1.
“It’s quite remarkable,” he instructed The Register, paying tribute to the abilities of the Voyager team. “We’re now seeing a new generation come in to keep Voyager going because the people who came in originally and built it have long retired.”
Indeed, the challenge scientist for the Voyager challenge, Ed Stone, passed away in June 2024 at the age of 88. A memorial for Stone is planned at JPL in December.
As for Voyager 1, since they regained contact with the probe, engineers are gathering data to restore it to normal operations.
While the team that designed and built the Voyager spacecraft loaded the probes with backups and redundancies, Hunt laughed, “It is getting a bit surprising…”
“Damn thing keeps going!” ®
