NASA Voyager 1 Comes Back to Life Using 1981 Tech: 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 the spacecraft on October 24.
This NASA spacecraft is in interstellar space at a distance of more than 15 billion miles. It experienced a brief interruption in communications on 16 October due to the outage of one of its transmitters. It is being told that this shutdown was probably due to the fault protection system of the spacecraft, which shuts down some systems when power is used too much.
An order sent on 16 October
According to NASA, a message takes about 23 hours to travel one way from Earth to Voyager 1 and vice versa. On October 16, when NASA engineers sent a command to the spacecraft, they could not detect its response until October 18. A day later, communication with Voyager 1 was completely lost. After investigation, the space agency team found that Voyager 1’s fault protection system had switched the spacecraft to another, lower-powered transmitter.
Voyager-1 has two radio transmitters
Voyager 1 has two radio transmitters, but it has been using only one, called ‘X-band’, for several years. However, the second transmitter – ‘S-band’ – uses a different frequency which has not been used since 1981. For now, 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.
Team of scientists is working continuously
Voyager mission assurance manager Bruce Wagner told CNN that engineers are taking precautions as they want to determine whether there are any potential risks from turning on the X-band. Meanwhile, engineers sent a message to Voyager 1 on October 22 to check whether the S-band transmitter was working and received confirmation on October 24, but this is not a solution the team will be working on for very long. Till you want to trust.”
Voyager 2 overtook it in 1977
Let us tell you that Voyager-1 was launched after Voyager-2, but due to speed, it left Voyager 2 behind on December 15, 1977. This spacecraft is the first man-made object to go into interstellar space.
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