NASA’s 47-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft recently established contact with Earth after a brief pause with the help of a radio transmitter that has not been used since 1981. NASA engineers at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) in California reestablished contact with it. The spacecraft on October 24.
The spacecraft, which is more than 15 billion miles away in interstellar space, experienced a brief interruption in communications on October 16 due to the shutdown of one of its transmitters. This shutdown was likely caused by the spacecraft’s fault protection system, which shuts down certain systems when power usage becomes too high.
According to NASA, it takes about 23 hours for a message to travel in one direction – from Earth to Voyager 1 and vice versa. When NASA engineers sent a command to the spacecraft on October 16, they did not hear its response until October 18. A day later, communications with Voyager 1 stopped completely.
After investigation, the space agency team discovered that Voyager 1’s fault protection system had switched the spacecraft to another, lower-powered transmitter.
Voyager 1 has two radio transmitters, but for years only one has been used, called ‘X-band’. However, the other transmitter – ‘S-band’ – uses a different frequency which has not been used since 1981.
Currently, NASA has opted to avoid switching back on the X-band transmitter until they can determine what activated the fault protection system – which could take several weeks.
“Engineers are being cautious as they seek to determine if there is any potential risk in turning on the It was working and they received confirmation on October 24. But it’s not a fix the team wants to rely on for very long,” Bruce Wagner, Voyager mission assurance manager, told CNN.
Voyager 1 was launched after Voyager 2, but due to the faster route it exited the asteroid belt before its twin, and was overtaken by Voyager 2 on December 15, 1977. The spacecraft is the first man-made object to travel into interstellar space.
The spacecraft was the first to cross the heliosphere – the boundary where influences coming from outside our solar system are stronger than those coming from the Sun.
So far, Voyager 1 has discovered a thin ring around Jupiter and two new Jovian moons – Thebe and Metis. It also found five new moons and a new ring called ‘G-ring’ on Saturn.
