Launched two weeks apart in 1977, the Twin Voyager probes changed the way we see our Solar System sending incredibly detailed views of Jupiter, Saturn, Neptune and Uranus. More than 47 years later, both spacecraft are still exploring the uncharted territory of interstellar space.
And it’s not just its longevity that captivates. Voyager 1, 24.9 billion kilometers away, is the most distant man-made object from Earth. It’s amazing to think that something created by teams of people on our planet is so far away, carrying a golden record of human history in case any extraterrestrial intelligence crosses its path.
But the Voyager team has become increasingly creative to keep both probes running, and soon, the challenges may be too great to overcome.
Traveling the universe
Voyager 1 is back online and operating normally after a weeks-long communications blackout that prevented engineers from receiving its scientific data. The problem resulted from the spacecraft’s decreasing power supply, which the Voyager mission team attempted to protect by shutting down non-essential systems.
Of the 10 scientific instruments with which Voyager 1 began its journey, four are currently collecting data about its cosmic environment, and each year, the spacecraft loses more of its precious energy supply.
“But these probes have lasted much longer than anyone anticipated, and it’s amazing that we’re squeezing every last bit of energy (and science!) out of them,” said Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena. , California.
Voyager 1 and its twin send scientific data continuously through the Deep Space Network, a system of radio antennas on Earth, with about six to eight hours of the probes’ detections returning each day. Data is not stored on board, so anything that was sent home by Voyager 1 during the transmitter problem was lost.
“However, the science that Voyager is doing now is really about the big picture and long-term observations, so the team is not too worried about this disruption,” Badaruddin said. “The bigger question is how long we can keep scientific instruments running with the current energy available.”
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This content was originally published in Almost 50 years of exploring space, low energy threatens Voyager probes on the CNN Brasil website.
Source: CNN Brasil
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