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NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix
by nullhole
It's Quieter in the Twilight[1] is a 2022 film about associated engineers.
[1] Trailer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8vJT8AW0wYw , Free with ads: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RIP1p5gAoak
Part of this excellent movie revolved around the months-long shutdown of the 70-meter antenna at the Deep Space Network station in Canberra, Australia. Coincidentally, the new JPL press release about Voyager 1's thrusters also details a new months-long shutdown (May 2025-Feb 2026) of that same antenna for more upgrades. It's the only antenna that can transmit to Voyager 2, which flew south of the ecliptic after its Neptune flyby. The DSN stations in Spain and California can still transmit to Voyager 1, which flew north of the ecliptic after its Saturn flyby. (Todd Barber, quoted in the The Register article and in JPL's press release, appears in the movie.)
Not available in my country :(
This is hacker news. Fix it.
Thanks for the recommendation! I watched this last night and really enjoyed hearing from the folks keeping it going.
I can't imagine how rewarding it would be to push this fix and, after many hours, get confirmation of success. I'd be chasing that high the rest of my career.
Less impactful obviously, but might I recommend correspondence chess? You will live with constant reminders that past you was either a genius or a moron.
I dont need chess for that, my life is perfectly capable of reminding me that i was either really smart or really stupid, often enough
We are in the "wait days" range now. More than a day out, plus another back.
I would love the elation of success, but 48 hours of sitting on the edge of my seat, idk
talk about tantric
Obviously, it's a great outcome that it worked. But the alternative--"it could trigger a small explosion," JPL noted--would have been interesting too. A sort of in fire or in ice outcome. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44263/fire-and-ice
You're literally reaching across billions of miles to bring something back to life that everyone thought was gone.
Now imagine the thrill of pushing knowledge to a classroom full of voyagers.
Cheers to NASA and to all teachers!
Of course, when you fail, you'll be 'that guy who bricked Voyager I' forevermore. Just imagine the pressure before sending that commit.
All the best victories are partially the relief of not failing
> The backup roll thrusters in use are now at risk due to residue buildup in their fuel lines
Such a human experience this probe is having
It's amazing to think we're still in touch with something launched in 1977, still doing science, still responding to commands... even if we have to wait 23 hours to find out if it worked
46 hours ... if you're lucky! :) 23 hours for a command to reach the spacecraft and 23 hours more for the spacecraft's response to reach Earth. If you're lucky: the Voyager project has to compete with other projects for antenna time on the Deep Space Network. If they can't get two slots 46 hours apart, they rely on delayed telemetry to verify that a command was received and successfully processed.
Afaik we always have at least one downlink dish pointed at voyager all the time. At least, last i saw the DSN site
70-meter dish antennas are needed to transmit to Voyager and there is one 70-m dish at each of the 3 DSN stations in California, Spain, and Australia. The Australian station is the only one that can see Voyager 2 and because of the Earth's rotation, that's only for part of the day. Downlink can make use of smaller arrayed antennas (including non-DSN antennas), but I still think they have to be scheduled; i.e., the antennas have to be pointed at the Voyager spacecraft and computer time for ground system DSN processing of downlink data has to be allocated. I don't know for sure though, so you may be right.
>we have to wait 23 hours to find out if it worked
Still quicker than my last offshore team.
"The backup roll thrusters in use are now at risk due to residue buildup in their fuel lines, which could cause failure as early as this fall."
If anyone was curious where residue comes from in hypergolic fuel systems, the answer is it's SiO2 (silica) from decaying rubber components,
"After 47 years, a fuel tube inside the thrusters has become clogged with silicon dioxide, a byproduct that appears with age from a rubber diaphragm in the spacecraft’s fuel tank".
┕ https://science.nasa.gov/missions/voyager-program/voyager-1/...
An HN commenter tracked down relevant documentation on NTRS,
"They expel the Hydrazine(N2H4) fuel out of a spherical Ti tank by inflating a rubber balloon that involve Teflon inside the tank using helium supply. I guess N2H4 was potent enough to degrade even those space age materials."
https://ntrs.nasa.gov/api/citations/19810001583/downloads/19...
Incredible that they're doing over the air updates for a piece of 50 year old technology using an extremely low bandwidth link, with hours of latency, with no physical access, and doing so without ever permanently losing the link or bricking the device.
I looked into its Viking Computer Command Subsystem (CCS), but there's little documentation out there.
They’re not always so lucky. Mars Global Surveyor was bricked with a bad update.
No air in space. Over the void updates?
Got an internship offer this Summer to work at JPL on the Deep Space Network, but had to turn it down to finish my graduate degree.
Would have liked to have been there while this was going on! Hopefully I can get lucky again, but funding is in trouble these days.
Moments like this remind me exactly why the hairs on my arms stand up every time I see the NASA logo. It’s not just science, it’s the amazing inspiring human achievement. Incredible work, NASA team.
It's decades of human curiosity, persistence, and creativity all packed into one little spacecraft still whispering to us from the edge of the solar system
I miss that spirit of curiosity, so much has become cultural mudslinging and navel gazing, plus money in the hands of those who don’t have the capacity to do any good with it. Bill Gates recently announcing he will give everything away should be the norm, not the exception in terms of spirit.
I think the problem is that when you take things at face value, your naivety eventually gets exploited, and you learn to always be on guard.
The problem is that exploitation of anyone and everyone you can has been normalized and glorified in our culture.
We could just all agree that exploitation of others is wrong and unacceptable and severely punish those that try to exploit vulnerable people. But no, defauding Granny for her entire retirement is acceptable behavior now.
It's not just "acceptable behavior", it is literally taught as the thing to strive for in business programs and obsessed over in weekly meetings and the primary way to get on magazine covers.
It's frankly bonkers how many insane success-at-long-odds stories NASA has and how few "we made a stupid mistake and everything exploded" stories NASA has.
For every Climate Orbiter "we made an oopsie converting metric to imperial" story, there are three "we figured out how to get the crew of Apollo 13 to fit a square peg into a round hole and they can breath now" miracles.
I mean, sure, there's Apollo 1's "we put people and a bunch of wires in a pressurized can of pure oxygen", but there's also the Perseverance Rover's "we made a crane that holds itself aloft with rockets and lowers a one ton rover gently to the ground on a tether."
> It's frankly bonkers how many insane success-at-long-odds stories NASA has and how few "we made a stupid mistake and everything exploded" stories NASA has.
That’s what happens when engineers are allowed to engineer things, rather than being forced to “move fast and break things”.
Things that slightly move, make all things better. As in propelling the physics of the situation (rattle the solar panel) and then reevaluate, recover.
I completely agree with you. NASA consistently does amazing things.
Unfortunately I just can’t leave this whole “Imperial vs Metric” thing alone so here comes a tangent.
> "we made an oopsie converting metric to imperial"
US Customary*. The United States has never used the Imperial system. It didn’t even exist at the time of the revolution.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comparison_of_the_imperial_a...
Also since I’m already being pedantic Mars Climate Orbiter was not lost to a conversion error. US Customary units were provided by Lockheed software to a NASA system that expected SI units. It would not have been lost if either system was used consistently.
Two space shuttles exploded, killing everyone on board.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Challenger_disas...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Space_Shuttle_Columbia_disaste...
They did, yes. And there are fascinating failure stories for each one. But my point is that there were more miraculous successes than miraculous failures. Heck, in my opinion, given that the Space Shuttle flew in atmosphere like a brick, and given that there was no possible way to get a second shot at the landing strip, the fact that they landed successfully every time (except for Columbia, of course) is amazing.
The Apollo flights in particular were interesting. For example, in the case of Apollo 14, when Houston was literally reading new machine code to the astronauts over radio who were punching in POKE instructions by hand to change the code.
> except for Columbia, of course
And Challenger.
Given that exploded on the way up because of the SRBs, this doesn't say anything about the orbiter (the bit that flies like a brick) landing.
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Good point, let's just shut it down, nobody should do anything
That's not my point. The learned painful lessons and their success rate is high.
Wasn’t that more the point of the person you replied with counterexamples to?
Let’s assume good faith all round. One poster rightly highlights the overwhelmingly positive track record. Another points out the negatives went a little beyond an “oopsie”.
Yeah just being respectful to those 14 astronauts who died. They are worth mentioning. Nasa had major setbacks - not an "oopsie". Didn't mean to hijack the thread. Well done Voyager team.
I think this is an unfair characterization of the comment. Nobody is dismissing the shuttle crews. The “oopsie” was in reference to the Mars Climate Orbiter mishap that did not involve loss of human life.
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Didn’t they just stop crewed space flights for (almost)decades instead?
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And a bunch of other missions worked great. Learn from failures, progress.
Yeah it's not "bonkers" or "insane". They learned the hard way. Painful lessons.
The cost of doing things (I remember watching the Challenger live on TV at the time).
Every now and then we watch/read in the news that # of workers died while building that bridge/road/building/etc. We don't stop making bridges/roads/buildings. We just make it safer. Will people continue dying unnecessary/unnatural deaths? Unfortunately, yes. Let's minimise this.
My children are probably going to have a similar reaction to the SpaceX logo. I grew up watching shuttle launches, my dad grew up watching the moon landings, and now my children are seeing those boundaries pushed even more. I can’t say how cool it was to watch the tower catch the SpaceX rocket. My children were awed.
They were so thrilled when he launched a car into space with a manakin playing music. Like, who does that?? But it is simply inspiring to children. The next generation of engineers are going to see him as a hero.
I think Musk never lost his boyish wonder at the universe. Not even extreme wealth could take it away from him. I’m very thankful to have him as a role model for my children. Does he do things I disagree with? Yes. But I’m not going to destroy their hero because he is having a very positive, enabling influence on them.
It is so fulfilling to have my child say “Daddy can I show you my plans for building a train?” and hear them connect that curiosity and wonder with “like Elon Musk’s rockets, daddy.”
another hair raiser is that Voyager is going to be one light day out soon which is solidly into sci fi territory, but real
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It's amazing that they managed to do that - but the frequency of those "NASA used insane engineering hack to circumvent yet another failing system on Voyager 1/2" articles seems to be sharply increasing lately.
Seems like a sign to me that we are nearing the eventual end of life of the probes, despite all the incredible achievements.
They’re currently facing budget cuts and always push tons of stories about how amazing they are in response.
Perfect case study for programmers desing long term critical systems. With all our fancy "frameworks", there is Voyager 1, who is 15.6 billion miles away running on simple logic with limited change options.
Such a beautiful tribute to the tenacity of humanity's creativity to beat the odds.
... and good old school engineering.
Proper job.
NASA is truly one of the most inspiring organizations out there
Yes, it is a source of endless, impossible, triumphant, science stories.
You know what we should do?We should find the guy who designed that thrusters system and chew him out in public for great catharsis and not future prooofing...
Can’t wait until V’Ger comes back to visit us in the 23rd century to tell us about its travels.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Trek:_The_Motion_Pictur...
Any reading recommendations about leadership at NASA? It amazes me that they've delivered do much value, often very quickly, despite being such a large, complex organization.
I recently started reading Peter Westwick's 2007 book, Into the Black: JPL and the American Space Program, 1976-2004. I've only gotten up into the 1980s so far and I find it a good read. Leadership? Sausage making. Per Westwick, there have always been contentious relations between NASA headquarters, the different NASA centers, JPL, and Caltech. (JPL is a NASA center, but staffed by Caltech employees, and relations between JPL and Caltech themselves are often strained.) At JPL, there were frequent shufflings of people in leadership roles. Add in the politics of the whole thing and trying to get funding from the government. If the Reagan administration had fully had their way, there wouldn't have been Voyager 2 flybys of Uranus and Neptune. Fortunately, many politicians (like Newt Gingrich, of all people!) supported NASA. (Westwick discusses all of this in his book.)
So my impression is that we were incredibly lucky that Voyager worked out so well in spite of its chaotic existence from its earliest developmental stages to now. I suppose there are some leadership lessons, but survivorship bias must be accounted for as many projects didn't make it off the drawing board.
Cold war was best thing happened to humanity for space exploration. AMAZING. I hope we see it again
You might enjoy For All Mankind -- it proposes exactly that the space race never ended. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/For_All_Mankind_(TV_series)
> Cold war was best thing ... I hope we see it again
Ummm, no thanks
You elided the crucial part of the statement…
Why hasn't anyone launched deep space probes intentionally to get the kind of data the Voyager probes are sending? Seems like a purpose designed probe could last even longer.
It would take generations to get there (if at all). The whole reason these could make it out there was due to a planetary alignment for gravity assists to allow them to reach escape velocity of the solar system. I'm not sure we could reach such velocities without that.
Was the planetary alignment that rare? Seems like it would be a good investment in science even if it takes decades to reach deep space.
That one in once in several hundred years. they were mostly interested in visiting 5 planets though not getting out. There may be other orbits that allow for more speed but skip something - I'm not an orbital engineer so I don't know how to calculate that.
there is a lot more to learn about planets than what is outside the solar system so there is much point in a dedicated misson out. We still won't reach any other star for thousands of years, and have no power supply that will last that long. (there are things to learn out side our solar system, but most of it we can learn with a telescope from earth)
I don't remember the exact numbers, but it's an alignment that only happens every hundred years or so.
Reaching escape velocity is surely achievable without the special alignment.
The point of the alignment, and the point of the Voyager program, was to visit the outer planets.
The alignment permitted unique trajectories that facilitated close fly-bys of each planet in order to collect a maximum amount of data with each visit.
The alignment was merely a very opportune moment to jump on the gravity-assists. The extra velocity was icing on the cake.
Without the alignment and without gravity assists, you could probably reach a direct escape velocity. Gemini (the LLM) tells me that that's about 42.1 km/s. More than would get you to the Moon, for sure. But a special planetary alignment is not strictly necessary to bail out of the solar system, just some powerful rocketry. But ask yourself, who or what would leave the solar system without visiting our planets first? That seems a silly way to go!
Pioneer 10 and Pioneer 11 are out there as well, and New Horizons has only been launched in 2006.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Horizons
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_artificial_objects_lea...
It took 40 years to get where it is now, and I don't think anyone wants to fund a project that will only begin its data gathering data in 40 years. That's a lot of new leaders
It may be survivorship bias but I can't imagine current so complex and fragile engineering achieving such durability.
Once you apply vibe-engineering to everything how we can even keep anything working beyond 1 year warranty. You can't RMA space probes.
But maybe we should send 50000 cheap (fr)agile probes like Starlinks into deep space and push updates randomly. Maybe just one makes it over 50 years mark.
Ah, and we should call it Starsperm. I think I should add "/s" here.
Breakthrough Starshot StarChip (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Breakthrough_Starshot#StarChip) is the closest thing:
> StarChip is the name used by Breakthrough Initiatives for a very small, centimeter-sized, gram-scale, interstellar spacecraft envisioned for the Breakthrough Starshot program,[1][36] a proposed mission to propel a fleet of a thousand StarChips on a journey to Alpha Centauri, the nearest star system, about 4.37 light-years from Earth
Very nice, amazing they were able to keep them working.
I remember when they were launched, I saw an article saying somehow the engineers added better components some functionalities even when they were forbidden. Somehow they hid it.
I forgot exactly what the articles said, but it indicated this was done due to a once in many centuries of the alignment.
It’s crazy to think someday they’ll be an article here on Hackernews declaring that we’ve be unable to contact Voyager 1, and that we’ll probably never hear from it again. Could be soon. When that day comes, we should have links to all these articles compiled in a list. The upvotes should be glorious.
I think I'm getting more emotional over the years. I'm pretty sure I'll actually cry when we lose connection to this amazing device. I'd bow profusely to anyone who has been part of keeping it active.
(The conspiracy theorist in me could argue that since not much is happening in outer space, perhaps no one would notice if they started synthesizing responses from it. If they could do it so convincingly with the moon landing, surely this would be easier? /s)
Crafted by Rajat
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