NASA Pulls Off Delicate Thruster Swap, Keeping Voyager 1 Mission Alive

I continue to be fascinated by how they:<p>1. Are able to diagnose the problems remotely at such distances and on such old hardware. How can they even measure the thruster tube apertures here?<p>2. Decide what actions to take. It&#x27;s not like they have a local test device to experiment on is it? (Even if they did I can&#x27;t imagine how they&#x27;d reproduce the conditions of the real thing.) And if they choose poorly, I&#x27;d assume the mission&#x27;s over. There&#x27;s no replacing Voyager 1 if they brick it.<p>3. Have such fine control over the hardware. For something built in the 70&#x27;s when RAM was largely measured in kB, they seem to have an insane amount of flexibility to remotely reconfigure the equipment. Whatever they did, there must have been some real foresight.

- <i>&quot;A fuel tube inside the thrusters has filled up with silicon dioxide, a side effect of age within the spacecraft’s fuel tank.&quot;</i><p>Where the heck do you get SiO2 from on a spacecraft? Some kind of silicone?<p>edit: <i>&quot;clogged with silicon dioxide, a byproduct that appears with age from a rubber diaphragm in the spacecraft’s fuel tank&quot;</i>[0] —I&#x27;m guessing that is a silicone rubber. I didn&#x27;t know that rubber can decompose into sand.<p>[0] <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;science.nasa.gov&#x2F;missions&#x2F;voyager-program&#x2F;voyager-1&#x2F;voyager-1-team-accomplishes-tricky-thruster-swap&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;science.nasa.gov&#x2F;missions&#x2F;voyager-program&#x2F;voyager-1&#x2F;...</a>

2 weeks ago, Bruce Wagoner from the Voyager program gave a talk at !!Con about how they recovered from the CMOS memory issue that they had a year ago.<p>It’s basically blind debugging with a latency of 45 hours.<p>The talk is amazing and goes through the computer architecture of the spacecraft as well as the challenges of dealing with something that is so old, with so documentation that has conflicting information or unreadable etc.<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;dF_9YcehCZo?si=W_b3NJ7vgxaYS1__" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;youtu.be&#x2F;dF_9YcehCZo?si=W_b3NJ7vgxaYS1__</a>

The Voyager mission is such a wild achievement. Both the sublime design and craftsmanship that must have gone into the hardware, and the deep institutional knowledge required to keep it running is awe-inspiring.

Probably a better link: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;science.nasa.gov&#x2F;missions&#x2F;voyager-program&#x2F;voyager-1&#x2F;voyager-1-team-accomplishes-tricky-thruster-swap&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;science.nasa.gov&#x2F;missions&#x2F;voyager-program&#x2F;voyager-1&#x2F;...</a>

Great to see they bought her some more time.<p>I watched this excellent Voyager documentary recently:<p><a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.itsquieterfilm.com&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.itsquieterfilm.com&#x2F;</a>

I had the <i>extreme</i> pleasure of seeing Bruce Waggoner of the Voyager team give a keynote at !!Con just last month. The recording landed on YouTube just a couple days ago, so this is great timing: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dF_9YcehCZo" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.youtube.com&#x2F;watch?v=dF_9YcehCZo</a>

It&#x27;s been operating for 47 years and it still has fuel left to make attitude corrections. I wonder how they managed that feat.

I&#x27;ve heard good things about some Voyager documentaries, and I&#x27;ve wanted to watch one with my daughter, but NASA keeps making the documentaries out-of-date and incomplete. How many amazing stories will there be to tell by the time Voyager is truly beyond our knowledge?

Official release: <a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;science.nasa.gov&#x2F;missions&#x2F;voyager-program&#x2F;voyager-1&#x2F;voyager-1-team-accomplishes-tricky-thruster-swap&#x2F;" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;science.nasa.gov&#x2F;missions&#x2F;voyager-program&#x2F;voyager-1&#x2F;...</a><p>(<a href="https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41505008">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;news.ycombinator.com&#x2F;item?id=41505008</a>)

Just another day at the office for the Voyager 1 team. Wow.