United States: NASA engineers have already fixed the problem that caused Voyager 1, the farthest spacecraft from Earth, to lose contact with mission control. The spacecraft is actually now working normally again.
The issue started basically in October when Voyager 1 switched to a weaker radio transmitter, which made it literally harder for NASA to communicate or make contact with the spacecraft. Voyager 1 is over like 15.4 billion miles away from Earth and is exploring space no one has ever seen before!
Indeed, this probe made the transmitter swap itself by the command of it’s computer because Voyager I had too little power and the team uploaded a command to turn one of heaters.
However, the change did not allow engineers to receive the information about the status of Voyager 1 and the science data collected by its instruments for almost a month.
As reported by the CNN, the probes were never really designed to be operated like this, and the team is learning new things day by day, Kareem Badaruddin, Voyager mission manager at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory in Pasadena, California said via an e-mail. “Praise God they were able to overcome this and glean some experiences.”
But this is only one of many challenges the mission team has had to overcome in recent years as Voyager 1, and its sister ship, Voyager 2, keep on going past 47 years of their launch.
Less power, better ideas
Despite being launched in separate missions in 1977, the probes have defied expectations of their four-year mission: to fly by the largest planets in the Solar System.
Now they are in interstellar space where no other man-made object has ever been and certainly no other spacecraft as they are now beyond the heliosphere, the magnetic bubble generated by the sun and which extends far past the orbit of Pluto.
Both spacecraft draw electrical power by utilizing the heat from decaying plutonium. NASA states that the probes have lost approximately 4 watts of power each year. That’s equivalent to a small, energy efficient light bulb.