Here is something to cleanse your timeline in these trying times.
The venerable Voyager 1 spacecraft underwent another major surgery in March this year. The fuel lines (arteries 😄) of the currently operational thrusters that are used to control the roll attitude of the spacecraft are getting clogged and there is the possibility of it failing sometime this fall. So, the team figured out a way to revive a dormant set of thrusters whose heaters had failed in 2004.
The delicate operation required sending commands to turn on the failed thruster and to flip a switch to enable its heater. There was a serious risk that if the spacecraft attitude changed sufficiently to require a thruster firing and the heater had failed to turn on, it would cause an explosion and the demise of the 47+ year mission.
These are very tricky and risky operations, performed from 23 light-hours away on 1970’s era creaky hardware.
The commands were sent on March 18 and after an agonizing 2 day wait, telemetry was received from Voyager 1 that the heaters had indeed turned on and the thrusters are good to go.
www.jpl.nasa.gov/…
The team was under intense time pressure as well, because from May 4, 2025 through February 2026, Deep Space Station 43 (DSS-43), the 70-meter-wide antenna in Canberra, Australia, that’s part of NASA’s Deep Space Network, will be undergoing upgrades. It will be offline for most of that time, with brief periods of operation in August and December. That station is the only one with sufficient power to send commands to the Voyager spacecraft.
The clogging in the fuel tube of the thrusters occurs due to silicon dioxide deposits, a byproduct that appears with age from a rubber diaphragm in the Hydrazine fuel tank.
Voyager 1 has been subject to many surgeries and treatments over the years to extend its life far beyond its planned mission. A similar but less risky operation was conducted in Aug 2024 when they switched the thrusters used for pitch and yaw attitude control to the set that had been switched out in 2002 due to clogging issues. science.nasa.gov/...
The two Voyager spacecraft have been traveling in space for over 47 years. Their power levels have dropped by about 50%, various instruments have been selectively shut off, yet the spacecraft continue to keep going and going, sending back valuable science data from interstellar space.
Both spacecraft exited the heliosphere – the protective bubble of particles and magnetic fields created by the Sun, and entered Interstellar space, in 2012 and 2018 resp.
Here are the locations and some vital stats on the two Voyager spacecraft, which were launched on Sept 5, 1977 and Aug 20, 1977 resp.
Only the DSN site in Canberra can see Voyager 2 and transmit signals to both spacecraft.
www.nasa.gov/...
Current mission status and stats —
It takes 46 hours to receive a response after sending a command to Voyager 1
science.nasa.gov/…
The Future of Voyager
The Voyager probes will be unable to keep instruments powered on much beyond the early 2030s, although NASA engineers may find clever ways to keep comms up a bit longer.
Voyager 1 is expected to reach the theorized Oort cloud in ~300 years and pass thru it in ~30,000 years.
In about 40,000 years, it will pass within 1.6 light-years of the star Gliese 445, which is currently 17.1 light-years from Earth, but will be just 3.45 light-years away at that time. Voyager 2 will pass 1.7 light-years from star Ross 248.
In 300,000 years, it will pass within less than 1 light-year of the M3V star TYC 3135–52–1.
Perhaps, some distant civilization in the distant future will find and decipher the Golden records carried by the two probes.
Epilogue
Kudos once again to the stellar Voyager team. And to the plucky Voyager spacecraft that boldly keep going where no spacecraft have gone before.
And jeers to the trump regime that wants to drastically cut NASA’s science and astrophysics budget and funnel our tax dollars to defense (offense really), homeland security (aka terrorizing immigrants and Democrats) and to their own pockets.
