NASA keeps ancient Voyager 1 spacecraft alive with Hail Mary thruster fix

NASA has revived a set of thrusters on the nearly 50-year-old Voyager 1 spacecraft after declaring them inoperable over two decades ago. It's a nice long-distance engineering win for the team at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, responsible for keeping the venerable Voyager spacecraft flying - and a critical one at that, as clogging fuel lines threatened to derail the backup thrusters currently in use. The things you have to deal with when your spacecraft is operating more than four decades beyond its original mission plan, eh? Voyager 1 launched in 1977. JPL reported Wednesday that the maneuver, completed in March, restarted Voyager 1's primary roll thrusters, which are used to keep the spacecraft aligned with a tracking star. That guide star helps keep its high-gain antenna aimed at Earth, now over 15.6 billion miles away, and far beyond the reach of any telescope. Those primary roll thrusters stopped working in 2004 after a pair of internal heaters lost power. Voyager engineers ... Read full article.