Voyager 1, the most distant spacecraft ever built by humanity, has gained extra breathing room to keep studying interstellar space. In September, NASA's team completed an energy-saving maneuver nicknamed the “Big Bang”: three devices on the spacecraft were switched off and replaced with three lower-power alternatives, in a swap that had to happen simultaneously to keep heat distributed correctly across the probe.
The effort is a direct response to the mission's aging power source. The Voyagers use radioisotope thermoelectric generators, which convert heat from plutonium into electricity, and lose about 4 watts of power per year as the material decays. Without the September maneuver, the team would have needed to switch off another Voyager 1 science instrument as early as summer 2027. The same swap had been performed on Voyager 2 about six weeks earlier.
In October, the spacecraft also went through a communications scare. On October 18 and 19, NASA's Deep Space Network — the network of large antennas used to talk to spacecraft at the Moon and beyond — could not detect Voyager 1's signal during two scheduled attempts, 24 hours apart. The signal reappeared on October 20, before the team sent commands to investigate the problem, and communication has been maintained since then.
The cause is still under investigation. So far, the team has determined that one group of thrusters went offline and backup thrusters took over — an automatic fault-protection response, programmed to put the spacecraft into a safe, stable configuration when its computers detect something wrong. “This is the first time we've seen the spacecraft do something like this, but we are also at a point in the mission where we have to expect the unexpected,” said Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in Southern California.
Launched in 1977 with 10 dedicated science instruments, Voyager 1 is now, together with Voyager 2, the only spacecraft studying interstellar space directly — the region outside the heliosphere, the bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun. In recent years, declining power had already forced the shutdown of two science instruments.
The next symbolic milestone arrives on November 18: Voyager 1 will be 16.09 billion miles (25.89 billion kilometers) from Earth, the equivalent of one light-day — the distance light travels in one day. Traveling at about 38,000 mph (61,155 kph), the probe will take 24 hours just for a radio signal to reach it, and another 24 hours for the reply to come back. “If you want to say 'hello' to Voyager, you send your message and then you go home and you wait two days before you finally get a response,” said Suzanne Dodd, Voyager project manager at JPL.
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Image credit: one of the Voyagers in the JPL thermal vacuum chamber, on April 27, 1977. Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech.
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