NASA Voyager 1 Comes Back To Life Using 43 years Old tech

NASA’s spacecraft Voyager 1 surprised scientists by recently contacting Earth again. This spacecraft has been on a space journey for 47 years. The amazing thing is that the radio transmitter through which it made contact was last used in 1981. That means it sent the message with the help of a 43 year old transmitter. Scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) established contact with Voyager 1 on October 24.

Voyager 1 exists 15 billion miles away in space. On October 16, one of its transmitters shut down, causing a temporary disruption in communications. Scientists speculated that the shutdown might have been caused by the spacecraft’s fault protection system. of report AccordingThis system often shuts down some other systems running in the spacecraft. This system does this when the spacecraft starts consuming too much power.

According to NASA, it takes 23 hours for a message from Voyager 1 to reach Earth, or from Earth to Voyager 1. That means a message sent one-way covers the distance in about 1 day. On October 16, the engineers sent a command to the spacecraft, but till October 18 they did not receive any response from the spacecraft. Then a day later, contact with the spacecraft was completely lost. Investigation revealed that Voyager 1’s fault protection system had switched the spacecraft to another, lower power consumption transmitter.

Voyager 1 has two radio transmitters, but for many years it has been using only one, called the X-band transmitter. On the other hand, S-band transmitters use another frequency that has not been used since 1981. At present, NASA has postponed the decision to switch to X-band transmitter again.

The agency says it will not do so until it finds out why the spacecraft changed the transmitter. Meanwhile, scientists again sent a message to the spacecraft on 22 October, to which they received a reply on 24 October. This ensured that the spacecraft was working properly with the S-band transmitter. Voyager 1 has also discovered a thin ring around the planet Jupiter. Besides, its two new Jovian moons – Thebe and Metis have also been detected.