NASA Figured Out How To Keep Its 48-Year-Old Voyager 2 Probe Running For Yet Another Year (space.com) 30
NASA has squeezed at least another year of science out of Voyager 2 by cutting power to nonessential systems and switching to lower-power alternatives. Voyager 1 is expected to receive the same power-saving changes in the coming months. Space.com reports: Voyager 2 and its twin launched in 1977, called Voyager 1, rely on a form of nuclear battery known as a radioisotope thermoelectric generator that uses the heat produced by the decay of plutonium. But the supply of plutonium on each probe drops at about four watts a year on each spacecraft. To keep the probe running on this dwindling power supply, engineers recently reduced Voyager 2's power requirements by turning off a few non-science devices and using "lower-power alternatives" that are still effective enough to keep the spacecraft warm while it's so far from the sun, NASA officials said in a statement. "The spacecraft power margins have grown razor thin, requiring the team to conserve energy by shutting off non-essential devices and systems," NASA officials wrote of the mission, which is managed by the agency's Jet Propulsion Laboratory.
The drop in power is having a measurable science impact on both spacecraft -- each has turned off two of their science instruments since 2024 alone. While some of these instruments were shut off after the spacecraft finished their historic planetary flybys decades ago, others were turned off due to power requirements. Each spacecraft initially launched with 10 instruments, and Voyager 2 is now down to only three instruments. At first it looked as though Voyager 2 would have to shut down another of these instruments later this year, but luckily, the new power shifts will allow all three to operate "for at least another year," NASA said.
The drop in power is having a measurable science impact on both spacecraft -- each has turned off two of their science instruments since 2024 alone. While some of these instruments were shut off after the spacecraft finished their historic planetary flybys decades ago, others were turned off due to power requirements. Each spacecraft initially launched with 10 instruments, and Voyager 2 is now down to only three instruments. At first it looked as though Voyager 2 would have to shut down another of these instruments later this year, but luckily, the new power shifts will allow all three to operate "for at least another year," NASA said.
Is this (Score:2, Funny)
something to do with Persis Khambatta?
Nomad (Score:2)
Never beam it aboard the ship.
Re:Nomad (Score:4, Informative)
Even with Starship that would be a titanic undertaking. The Voyagers are moving away from us at 17 km/s. When you get to the Voyagers, you have to slow them down from 17 km/s to 0, and then accelerate in the opposite direction. You'd have to arrive at Voyager with thousands of tons of fuel [xkcd.com].
Re: (Score:2)
Voyager weighs a little less than a ton and is moving away at 17 kilometers per second
I didn't realize it was so heavy.
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Even with Starship that would be a titanic undertaking. The Voyagers are moving away from us at 17 km/s. When you get to the Voyagers, you have to slow them down from 17 km/s to 0, and then accelerate in the opposite direction. You'd have to arrive at Voyager with thousands of tons of fuel [xkcd.com].
There is another way. It will take far longer, but may not have as much fuel requirements. Instead of catching up to it, stopping it, then reaccelerating back to Earth, you would meet the probe in space then push it a long, loping arc back to Earth, all the while reducing your speed. Conserve its momentum rather than cutting it.
Again, this would take far longer, and is possibly more dangerous, but it is an alternative.
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Even with Starship that would be a titanic undertaking. The Voyagers are moving away from us at 17 km/s. When you get to the Voyagers, you have to slow them down from 17 km/s to 0, and then accelerate in the opposite direction. You'd have to arrive at Voyager with thousands of tons of fuel [xkcd.com].
There is another way. It will take far longer, but may not have as much fuel requirements. Instead of catching up to it, stopping it, then reaccelerating back to Earth, you would meet the probe in space then push it a long, loping arc back to Earth, all the while reducing your speed. Conserve its momentum rather than cutting it.
Again, this would take far longer, and is possibly more dangerous, but it is an alternative.
Maybe I haven't seen it, but there's something not being considered...just how fantastically long it would take to do all this. Getting the thing looping back to Earth? How about just catching up to the darned thing first. Remember it's got a 48-year head start and it's about 13.3 billion (with a 'b') miles from here and continuing to move away from the sun.
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Remember, it's in *space*. It has no rudder. The only way to change its trajectory is with a rocket engine. If you want to stop it moving away from Earth, you have to thrust towards the sun until that 17 km/s is reduced to zero. If you tried to make an arc by thrusting at 90deg to its current vector, you're just *adding* momentum in that direction and not reducing momentum in the outward direction.
The Pioneer and Voyager probes (Score:4, Interesting)
Although it would be wonderful if we could retrieve them, realisically we can't. And if we could get something to them to fit new nuclear batteries and replacements for components that cannot be revived, we could get newer probes out there with better sensors and a more powerful nuclear battery that could last a lot longer.
Having said that, I honestly wouldn't trust any of today's manufacturers to be capable of building anything with a comparable level of robustness, so a recharge mission isn't quite as stupid as it sounds. Almost, but not quite.
Still, fresh probes sent into the Kuipier Belt and the Heliopause would be extremely interesting.
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It's actually a lot harder. The fly-bys invovled gravitational slingshots, which not just steered the probes but vastly accelerated them. Without the slingshots, human rocketry of the time would not have had the capacity to get probes to solar system escape velocity.
Our understanding of asteroids is now reasonably good. We know they come in solid and rubble-pile formats. We know that several show signs of lava flows, suggesting they come from disintegrated planetoids with a liquid core. We've managed to lan
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The Oort cloud is theoretical only, at this point. The only way to find if it is real is to send something out there.
It is true that we have never seen any objects in the region known as the Oort cloud. They'd be too far away to observe. But that doesn't mean the Oort cloud is "theoretical only."
We have viewed lots of long-period comets, and have studied their elliptical orbits well enough to infer where their apogees are. And they're in the region we call the Oort cloud. That's indirect evidence of its existence. Indirect evidence is not weak evidence.
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The Oort cloud is theoretical only, at this point. The only way to find if it is real is to send something out there.
It's not clear that anything we'd be able to send out there would be able to find out more. The Oort cloud is SUPER low-density.
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Out of curiosity I have checked what CPU ISs were available in '77, there was 6502, 8080, Z80 (10x speed of viking's CPUs) albeit all done in NMOS, and NMOS is susceptible to radiation. Hence, the Viking's CPU were build on low-density CMOS discrete logic instead. Also better for power consumption. But I agree that 21th century equipment is designed with few years life span. Use and refuse, but not reuse.
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To be useful in deep space, you're going to have to deal with very harsh radiation, far harder than the Vikings dealt with. You really want to have some large number of computers, where the number has to be odd and exceed 5. The reason it has to exceed 5 is that you need 5 in order to be able to use the Byzantine General's Problem to discern which computers are working correctly and which are radiation damaged. Since some will be damaged over time and you want 5 computers still operating around the time the
Re:The Pioneer and Voyager probes (Score:5, Informative)
This is an interesting article:
https://hackaday.com/2024/05/0... [hackaday.com]
There are no microprocessors in the CCS. Rather, the processors are built from discrete 7400-series TTL chips. The machine does not have an operating system but rather runs bare-metal instructions. Both data and instruction words are 18 bits wide, with the instruction words having a 6-bit opcode and a 12-bit address. The 64 instructions contain the usual tools for moving data in and out of registers and doing basic arithmetic, although there are only commands for adding and subtracting, not for multiplication or division. The processors access 4 kilowords of redundant plated-wire memory, which is similar to magnetic core memory in that it records bits as magnetic domains, but with an iron-nickel alloy plated onto the surface of wires rather than ferrite beads.
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Although it would be wonderful if we could retrieve them, realisically we can't.
Outside of measuring the effects of long-term exposure to the space environment throughout the solar system, I'm not sure there's a scientific case for retrieving the Voyagers.
Apollo 12 did harvest parts of Surveyor 3 for that purpose, although the latter had been on the moon for only two and a half years. And there have been other unmanned return-missions to near(ish)-earth space. But the Voyagers were never designed to collect anything physical that could be examined later in situ.
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Well, not just the solar system but the heliopause as well, and the near-Sol galactic winds. We can estimate the effects of space from just about any ancient near-Earth space junk, but I'm not sure how we'd go about calculating the impact of the galactic winds on something. The Voyager sensors won't be sending back nearly enough high-quality data to establish that.
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I would not wonder if the probe actually has an electric inlet, after all the instruments most likely got tested after assembly. You probably could simply plug some power source into.
The engineers who built them thought abut so many things, perhaps even about that?
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I don't see the point in launching a rescue mission that would catch up to, and re-power, a very distant spacecraft with 1970s-era technology. Better to devote that effort to a brand new spacecraft with updated instruments.
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Agreed, was half joking anyway.
There is this idea about "beaming" post stamp sized micro satellites with a laser beam into deep space, actually aiming for Alpha Centauri (Proxima Centauri)
"StarChips". See here: https://breakthroughinitiative... [breakthrou...atives.org]
Similar proposals popped up in recent years several times.
As Proxima Centauri, holds an earth sized rocky planet in the habitable zone, that would be a way to go.
The proposed StarChips would fly in an endless stream of chips, with about 0.2c. That takes about 20 years
Congrats (Score:4)
Hats off for everyone at NASA working to keep the probe running. I would love to hear from any of the original designers or programmers to see their thoughts.
Re:Congrats (Score:4, Informative)
Find the documentary 'It's quieter in the twilight'. And Scott Manley's deep dive [youtube.com] on the recent Voyager 1 memory issue.
are we still learning anything (Score:2)
Is there anything we are learning with the instruments being shutoff other than how far we can communicate back to earth? Pretty cool but what is the bill for the pings back and forth??
Re:are we still learning anything (Score:4, Informative)
The bill for this is a rounding error compared to a tacky ballroom or Middle East War 3.0
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Is there anything we are learning with the instruments being shutoff other than how far we can communicate back to earth?
You're not learning anything from an instrument that is shut off. Those instruments that are still operating on both spacecraft are the Magnetometer (MAG) and the Plasma Wave Susbsystem (PWS). Voyager 2 also still has its Cosmic Ray Subsystem (CRS) operating. These all provide information about the heliospheric and interstellar space environments.
Pretty cool but what is the bill for the pings back and forth??
About $5 million USD per year for everything. And that includes the "pings" transferred and processed by the Deep Space Network of radio telescopes. Cheap, conside
V-Ger don't play... (Score:1)