How The Voyager Spacecraft Are Nonetheless Working After Extra Than 40 Years

As you’ll anticipate from decades-old expertise, the Voyager spacecraft have skilled their share of bugs. Just lately, Voyager 1 skilled an odd glitch with its angle management system, which is liable for orienting the spacecraft accurately. The management system was sending again garbled information, however the spacecraft was nonetheless pointed because it was presupposed to be.

Engineers discovered that the issue had occurred when the system began utilizing an previous pc as a substitute of the present pc it was presupposed to be utilizing. They had been capable of repair the issue by switching to the newer pc, however they did not discover out why the error had occurred within the first place.

“A thriller like that is form of par for the course at this stage of the Voyager mission,” mentioned Suzanne Dodd of JPL, mission supervisor for Voyager 1 and a pair of, mentioning that the mission was working far longer than the unique designers had ever meant.

A glitch hit Voyager 2 as properly when an influence provide subject meant {that a} safety routine was inadvertently toggled on when it did not must be in 2020. That was regarding as a result of it meant that the spacecraft was utilizing energy unnecessarily, and the spacecraft was positioned right into a mode with its devices powered off. Luckily, engineers had been capable of repair that inside a couple of weeks to get the routine turned off and the spacecraft’s devices turned again on.